Vaping is one of the biggest threats to Gen Z. Vaping was first marked to Gen Z teenagers as safer and healthier than cigarettes. They even tried to say vaping can’t get you cancer. But the opposite can tend to be true, as years went on scientists discovered that vaping and electronic cigarettes might be even more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. With many factors to be taken into place, because every company tends to manufacture its nicotine products differently there is actually no safe evidence to say which product is safer than the other, especially if we take the black market products into consideration. Some companies claim that their E-cigarettes contain less nicotine than causal cigarettes, which even though can be true for most of the case. Some other companies couldn’t be further from the truth. For example a single Juul pod contains 41 mg of nicotine that’s double the 20 mg amount of nicotine usually contained in a normal pack of cigarettes, and that’s not even the worst to top the list. A single Suorin pod contains contains 90 mg of nicotine more than 4 times the amount of a pack of cigarettes, and a statistic like that is even worse when it is to be taken into consideration that it is generally agreed that people use E-cigarettes at a rate more frequently than regular cigarettes. This is because vapes require a lot less time to get started. They can be kept in a person's pocket and with just a tap of a hand they are ready to go in just seconds after Initiation, and can be put right back into a person's pocket without having to be extinguished unlike cigarettes.
Therefore making vapes theoretically more dangerous because they theoretically offer a more frequent approach then compared to cigarettes. Yet nicotine isn’t the biggest problem. What’s alarming is that when you smoke an e-cigarette nicotine isn’t the only thing you have to worry about. The flavors in e-cigarettes depending of the type can be just as harmful or even more harmful then the very nicotine in these products. This is because these chemicals can travel into the lungs and get stuck on a person's alveoli making it hard to breathe, along with statement that these substances might just as well cause cancer, and lead to bacterial infections. But if Vaping is this dangerous you probably think not many people would be ignorant enough to try it. But that’s nowhere near the case especially for teenagers. Vaping had a 46 percent increase from 2020 to 2022, and 11 percent of all people aged 18 to 24 admit vaping at least once in the last 30 days.
Despite being advertised as a stress reliever for young adults studies show that teens who vape were experiencing anxiety more than teens who didn't so much that 60 percent of teens who practiced vaping reported an anxiety attack within the past weak compared to the 40 percent of kids who don’t vape at all. Because Most teenagers don’t understand how vapes actually cause cancer they choose not to educate their customers on how the actual mechanism on how nicotine causes cancer works. Because if they did, kids who vape would have a lot more stress on their hands. Nicotine isn’t the only cancer causing carcinogen chemical found in vapes and cigarettes, but rather just one of the 40 cancer causing carcinogens in vapes and cigarettes. In short Nicotine damages DNA and causes mutations leading to cancer in a a similar concept to UV radiation. Except the difference being that nicotine causes mutations through chemicals and UV causes mutations through lights. It’s a lot more complicated but that’s the idea in a nutshell. When nicotine is metabolized in the cell it turns into the chemical carcinogen Cotinine which is far more dangerous than the nicotine the FDA approved off. And that’s not all the carcinogens in vapes, may not only cause rapid mutations in a person's DNA and prevent repairs but they may also shrink a person's telomeres making a person's lungs not only mutate but also age quicker. Teenagers may not see the effects of vaping yet but as their telomeres shrink with age and their DNA mutations become more apparent over time they will wish they never vaped in the first place Because it’s not a hypothesis if nicotine causes dna to mutate it's a well studied fact nicotine that causes dna to mutate therefore lead to the lung cancer we associate it with. In conclusion I want the readers to know that smoking is the second most preventable cause of death after sucide. As many as 80-90 percent of lung cancer cases in the United States are linked to smoking. So let’s acknowledge these statistics and prevent Gen Z from being the lung cancer capital of generations.
