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Does vaping have an effect on your heart? We look at nicotine and what it causes to your body, and the comparison between smoking and vaping.
Vaping and Your Heart – Is Nicotine the Problem?
The effect of smoking on your health and how vaping can help
There is still a lot of ongoing research into vaping and any potential harm it can cause, especially concerning the health of the heart and lungs. The conversation bottles down to the comparison of harm between smoking and vaping, and the reason behind vaping.
What does smoking do to your body?
The long and short of smoking cigarettes is that they are extremely harmful to our health. Smoking causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease, diabetes, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and much more. It also increases the risks of many other equally harmful diseases and health problems.
Even those around smokers don’t escape harm-free due to the sheer number of harmful carcinogens that are exhaled when smoking. Second-hand smoking was estimated in 2003, to have been responsible for approximately 12,000 premature deaths a year in the UK.
Smoking increases your risk of developing more than 50 serious health conditions and, according to the NHS, around 78,000 a year die in the UK from smoking. This alone should be a good enough reason to make you want to quit smoking. We know that it’s rarely easy for someone to quit which is why E-Cigarettes were developed to help smokers quit.
What happens to your heart when you quit smoking?
When you quit smoking after just 20 minutes your heart rate drops to a more normal level. Cigarettes have been shown to increase your blood pressure and heart rate. This could be due to the nicotine or the many chemicals that are inhaled when burning tobacco. Between two weeks and three months of quitting, your risk of heart attack drops due to improved circulation and better oxygen levels.
After a year of quitting smoking your risk of heart disease is cut in half compared to someone who is still smoking. Those that have remained smoke-free for five years also have a lower risk of stroke. Not smoking for 15 years will put your risk of heart disease the same as someone who has never smoked. It just goes to show that the body can heal from the damages of smoking, but it’s important to note that smoking can still leave its mark on your health, especially for those who have smoked for a long time. The sooner you can quit the better.
The effects of nicotine
It’s reported by the NHS that nicotine while being an addictive substance, is relatively harmless. Most of the harm that comes from smoking can be traced back to the thousands of harmful carcinogens that are present in tobacco smoke.
Nicotine is both a sedative in some ways and a stimulant in others, due to how it reacts with different parts of our body. Most users of nicotine feel a ‘kick’ that is the result of adrenaline, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure. Nicotine also causes a slight increase in blood sugar and indirectly causes a release of dopamine in the pleasure and motivation areas of the brain.
Although nicotine isn’t the most harmful aspect of smoking, there is still some harm involved due to how it can affect your heart when consumed in excess. Nicotine is noted as a substance that raises blood pressure and increases heart rate. Therefore, it could increase the likelihood of having a heart attack, but this would still be a lower chance than those who smoke.
For a smoker looking to quit smoking, and quit nicotine, vaping provides a less harmful alternative to cigarettes.
Why vaping offers less harm
As stated before, vaping isn’t completely harmless due to the presence of nicotine. Therefore, vaping is not recommended for anyone who hasn’t smoked before – E-Cigarettes should be used as a means of helping quit smoking. It may yet be hard to compare the risks of heart disease between vapers and smokers, especially when most vapers were smokers or still smoke, but it is noted that it’s likely that the risk caused by vaping would be lower than that of smoking.
One of the benefits of vaping includes the ability to vape without nicotine. Through the use of shortfills (nicotine-free E-Liquids), vapers can adjust their nicotine intake and potentially decrease it until they no longer need nicotine.
When looking at vaping harm there are still more studies to be concluded but it is widely accepted by experts that vaping is less harmful than smoking. Here at Pod Salt, our goal is to help smokers make the change to a less harmful way of consuming nicotine, and eventually helping vapers quit nicotine altogether.
Have you quit smoking or are you still in the process? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
