But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine?
I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?
I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?
Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675...
[edit] To compare that to caffeine, this study does not see a significant risk increase for coffee drinkers. So it seems that vaping is objectively more harmful:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/
[edit2] And an umbrella review, because I like them a lot: This shows that negative effects of high coffee intake mostly disappear when controlling for smoking. Note this paper has a correction, which I think is a great sign of credibility. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024
Nicotine gum is relatively harmless for example. Or perhaps imbibe on a Nicotini[0]?
[edit] Seems that nicotine is not really harmless, even in gum or patches: double the risk of heart palpitations and chest pains, 1.67 the risk of nausea and vomiting, 1.5 times the risk of gastrointestinal complaints, and 1.4 times the risk of insomnia.
Of course, if you measure anything this closely with >100k participants in RCTs, it's bound to have a significant effect. But these odds ratios are not exactly small.
Caffeine and nicotine both exist in gum form. Have their been studies comparing that?
[0] which, to my horror, I just discovered actually exist
I guess vaping/nicotine, while not the worst vice out there, is still a vice lol; so they have their own dangers.
But vaping/nicotine can be very safe if you don't do it all the time. Occassional usage is fine. Many people naturally really like the nicotine though and have a hard time regulating their intake. If you let yourself get hooked, it can turn pretty unhealthy.
Are vapers more likely to get a heart attack or are people with a stressful life with a higher risk of a heart attack more likely to be vapers?
Sorry. Could not resist.
I would imagine a chunk of vapers are people trying to transition from smoking cigarettes and still suffering from some of the ill effects.
On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my head that told me it was "a good idea to go have a cigarette on the porch once I get out of bed," or "it's a good idea to have a cigarette when you get home." It was really creepy, I've never had a substance put ideas in my head 24+ hours after it was out of my system.
A single sip of coffee, or a cup of good black tea generally alleviates these symptoms. I had to drink a sip of coffee on day 4 while quitting coffee, and all my headache was gone.
The simplest is that I dislike being dependent on any substance.
A more nuanced reason is that I want to be able to use caffeine as a tool. A cup of coffee is the largest dose of caffeine that I am comfortable taking at any one time. If I already have caffeine tolerance at the level of a daily coffee habit, caffeine has lost much of its utility to me. However, if my tolerance is lower than that, I can really feel it when I do occasionally have use for a cup of coffee (e.g. the day before code freeze.)
Currently my caffeine intake is a cup of tea[0]. This is at the level where I don't hate myself if I miss it[1], and I can still use coffee as a tool on occasion. Also, you can pry my tea out of my cold dead hands.
[0] Note that how much caffeine a cup of tea has is much more nuanced than "black vs green". Cultivar, terroir, steep time are much more important to caffeine levels than how the tea is processed. In fact if anything, green tea cultivars have been shown to have, on average, very slightly more caffeine than black[2].
[1] I feel it, but it's not 3-5 days of migraines
[2] Y. Zuo et al, Simultaneous determination of catechins, caffeine and gallic acids in green, Oolong, black and pu-erh teas using HPLC with a photodiode array detector, Talanta 57 (2002) 307–316
Same here. All my daily coffee drinker friends say coffee has no effect on them. I drink it ~4-6 times a month (when I'm very busy) and I can feel the effects from one cup almost all day. More than two cups actually is quite uncomfortable.
I get weird swings in my caffeine tolerance, so I only consume caffeine 1-2 times a week, or less.
Caffeine can also cause weird mood swings. Its effects are similar to cocaine, just somewhat muted because the delivery mechanism is slower.
I've spent years as very heavy coffee and/or tea drinker but I have never been addicted to it, either physically or psychologically. I can (and sometimes do!) switch from heavy consumption to going days without it and I don't notice a difference.
In fact, I barely even feel any effects of caffeine at all. Never have.
I’ve know too many people who simply cannot quit smoking, even when it’s clear they’re rotting from the inside out.
Nicotine addiction is on an entirely different level than caffeine.
I've been on nicotine patches for several years (treating ADHD - very effective) and I'm not addicted at all. I still forget and my wife often has to remind me to put on one! There are no reports to the contrary among patch users.
In fact, even moderate pipe smoking reportedly isn't addictive - although it certainly is pleasurable (partly due to the nicotine, but mostly due to other compounds in the smoke). Pipe tobacco doesn't have all the additives (and nicotine salts) that cigarettes have; moreover, unlike cigarette smoking, pipe smoking normally does not involve inhalation—all of which smoothes and limits the nicotine blood concentration/time curve significantly compared to cigarettes and vaping, thus eliminating most of the addictive potential.
More info on nicotine itself - this is essentially a very broad bibliography with some commentary mixed in: https://gwern.net/nicotine
In contrast quitting caffeine took me several tries and I had to very carefully taper over the course of months to eventually be able to do it.
I also quit alcohol and that was pretty easy too. I used to drink every day and then I stopped without much trouble.
(My family credits his success in nicotine cessation to having previously kicked a 20-year heroin addiction. It would be interesting to see if you can “get good” at overcoming addictions, or if every substance is different for every person.)
But vaporizers have more than nicotine. There's other chemicals needed to produce vaporizer fluid, and it's far too soon to tell if they are safe. Even though most of them have been in the food supply, they haven't been inhaled at scale. We already found one that wasn't safe (Vitamin E Acetate), because it was causing very obvious problems. What about the non-obvious problems?
A more direct comparison to caffeine is a nicotine (not tobacco) pouch.
I was drinking 2 liters of coffee per day while finishing my Ph.D.. Next week I wasn't drinking, and after that I occasionally drank half a cup per day. This was seven years ago, and I still drink half a cup, because I like the taste of coffee.
I have at least a dozen vaping friends who said they started to stop smoking. Now at least half of them have heavily souped up, customized e-cigs. Two of them are making their own liquids with nicotine, rest are using bog-standard vapes.
None of them stopped smoking or nicotine intake, which was the goal of all of them.
Kudos to you but let's not pretend this is the average experience of people breaking even much milder levels of caffeine consumption.
The coffee acts by blocking tiredness/sleep receptors on the brain, so brain builds more of them to work normally. This is how coffee dependence and tolerance builds.
When you stop coffee, brain detects that the number of receptors is too high and starts to break them down. This is why you get the headaches.
That "one week" period is not an edge case, it's the science of it. If it was proved to be harder on that research, I'd never let my body to reach 2L/day levels.
Was this research similar to you drawing conclusions about nicotine based on the handful of your friends that vape?
What I gave was an example, and looks like you're upset about it.
Please keep in mind that while itsoktocry, itsnotoktosnark at HN [0].
However, language is both subjective and culture dependent (plus, words doesn’t carry tone and sound). If somebody asks the same question the same way in my native language to my face, it’s not only snarky, but it’s rude (and mildly offensive depending on the context).
I don’t think I’m expected to know the all possible cultural styles, and take anything and everything kindly and politely, all day, every day.
Henceforth, I tone matched the comment according to my perception. I might be correct or wrong according some dominant discussion culture here, and people may perceive me the snarkier one according to their cultures. I can’t judge them, but this doesn’t change the fact that the style of question is rude on my side, and I have the right to respond equally (to my perception).
Normally I’m a much softer person and don’t write sharp comments, so that one is an exception.
Lastly I’ll be posting a research tome on caffeine addiction/withdrawal to the person who asked, so you might one to follow that thread too.
Have a nice day :)
Likewise have a nice day, and thanks for the tip on the research tome! I'm definitely interested to see it :-)
- The base video I have talked about is from TedED. It's here [0].
- This study was done on rats in 1985 but verifies that caffeine tolerance is real [1].
- Another controlled study on humans about caffeine tolerance [2] involved one group taking caffeine and the others taking a placebo. Caffeine drinkers taking the placebo reported withdrawal symptoms, and non-drinkers taking caffeine reported overstimulation.
- A meta-study [3] details the symptoms and durations of caffeine withdrawal's effects. The paper cites that effects persist between 2 to 9 days, and the peak of the syndrome is around 20 to 51 hours. It also notes that caffeine introduction during this phase alleviates symptoms (This study basically confirms that what I have gone through after I stopped drinking coffee as I noted in a previous comment).
- This interesting study [4] explores the body's caffeine response via blood pressure change. Subjects are administered high doses of caffeine, and blood pressure is monitored. After day three, the blood pressure normalizes, and spikes disappear. The abstinence required to reset the pressure response is less than three weeks, pointing that the body resets caffeine tolerance in less than three weeks.
If you need the papers, or want more resources, please let me know.
Have a nice day.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjvYRgjCyU
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024320585...
[2]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245285
[3]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x