Many people choose to smoke hookah tobacco because it is not seen to be as harmful as smoking cigarettes.
It’s easy to assume smoking hookah is clean, since its structure is a waterpipe.
A waterpipe most people will tell you to sit down, you relax, you’re maybe with friends
For many, smoking hookah is a social thing.
It’s often used as something to relax with for an hour or two, maybe with friends
Many people, however, don’t realize how it affects their health.
Smoking hookah tobacco is NOT healthy.
Some say smoking hookah is equivalent to smoking multiple cigarettes.
But is that true?
In June of 2012, the Nicotine & Tobacco Research Journal published a survey of 105,000
U.S. university students, and their current tobacco use.
Hookah was ranked 2nd only to cigarettes as the most popular form of tobacco used on campus.
Dr. Thomas Eissenberg and his research team conducted numerous studies to understand
the health effects of smoking hookah.
Many participants didn’t think that smoking waterpipe was a problem because it’s filtered by water.
Many participates also stated that cigarettes are much more dangerous.
So which is worse?
When you smoke a cigarette, it takes you about five minutes to smoke a cigarette, taking about 10 puffs on average.
Each puff is about 50 milliliters, so you end up inhaling about 500-1,000 milliliters smoke.
When you’re smoking a waterpipe or a hookah, It takes you about 45 minutes to smoke.
During that time, it can take as many as 100 puffs, sometimes 150.
Each one of those puffs can be about 500 milliliters of smoke.
So what does that mean?
Each puff from a hookah is about the same amount of smoke as you get from an entire cigarette.
And if you’re taking 100 puffs of a cigarette sized amount of smoke, then that’s about 100 times the smoke that you’re getting from a waterpipe.
Of course, the means can vary. You can take less; you can take more.
But the bottom line is, you’re inhaling lots and lots of smoke when smoking hookah.
Imagine buying a 1-liter bottle of soda at the supermarket.
The volume of that bottle is approximately equivalent to the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.
Now imagine buying 100 of those 1-liter bottles of soda.
That amount of smoke is approximately equivalent to the smoke inhaled from a 45-minute hookah smoking session.
- THOMAS EISSENBERG: And whether it’s 60, 80, 100, or even 50 if you want to go lower, that’s still dramatically more smoke that’s being inhaled.
And we know the smoke contains nicotine that causes dependency, carcinogens that cause cancer, volatile aldehydes that cause lung disease, and heavy metals and other toxicants.
I think every hookah smoker I’ve ever spoken to or emailed or had an online conversation
with will agree with the statement: “Hookah smoking is more dangerous than breathing air.”
Many of them will say: “And it’s way less
dangerous than cigarette smoking.” So they’re making the comparison. And thus far, of all the data generated in my lab, Dr. Shihadeh’s lab, Dr. Benowitz’s lab, every other lab, I haven’t seen a single piece of evidence that supports the statement
that it’s less dangerous than cigarette smoking.
