Vapes. The less regulated and underground production, which is easily finding its way to the high street, is building to be a repeat of the tobacco issues with cigarettes.
Surprised this isn’t higher tbh.
My mom switched from chain smoking regular cigs to vaping. While I’m glad she’s significantly reduced her lung cancer risk, who knows what it’s really doing?
It’s better than smoking but definitely still unhealthy, especially chain vaping like many do. You should talk to her, let her know you’re worried about her health, and see if she might try reducing intake. I quit smoking cold turkey three years ago. It wasn’t easy, I was extremely irritable for a month, but the cravings became bearable after that. An easy trade for higher quality of life and longer life expectancy with less wasted money.
I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.
Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn’t be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!
Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn’t be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.
A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.
While with tabbaco, as @fubo@lemmy.world said
the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
With vaping, lots of studies on pg/vg vaping was done and not much has been found. The UK gov supports it for years now. Most of the bad name of vaping caused by people who didn’t bother to research or people who confused it with the EVALI cases,which bought their products illegally and contained vitamin E
Yeah, the 2019-2020 vaping lung illness outbreak had nothing whatsoever to do with nicotine vaping.
It was specifically caused by black-market THC vape cartridges containing vitamin E acetate as a filler. This chemical was marketed to black-market vape makers as “Honey Cut”, intended to dilute or “cut” cannabis extracts while keeping the mixture thick so it looked good to customers.
Legit cannabis vapes don’t include fillers; a typical California dispensary vape cartridge contains ~90% cannabinoids by weight. Nicotine vapes are water-based rather than oil-based, so vitamin E acetate would not mix with them.
Vitamin E acetate sounds like a healthy thing — it’s a vitamin, right? — but it’s not. When it’s heated in a vape, it produces a variety of chemicals that would be entertaining to the organic chemist — but no good for your lungs. You don’t need to be inhaling alkenes or ketenes, to say nothing of carcinogenic benzene.
(Hey stoners! Don’t use black-market carts, just like you wouldn’t smoke “synthetic cannabis” aka “spice”. If you want to vape instead of smoking, and you’re not in a place with good dispensaries with lab-tested vape products, use a dry-herb vape and plain ol’ herb.)
Yep. the whole vaping industry got ruined because of this, and it wasn’t even related to said industry. I guess it’s just another example of what lobbying is capble of.
That whole thing turned out to be a nothingburger. The report said that if you drink like 9 cans of diet soda it could possibly cause cancer. If you’re drinking 9 cans of diet soda a day aspartame is the least of your problems.
My wife has been telling me for years that research was still ongoing about aspartame being potentially carcinogenic, so I should be careful with my at most one diet soda a day. When the news first came up that the WHO was about to classify it as such, I was like “oh shit, it’s happening?”
And then the details came a few days later, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. 😆
Meat and any other animal product. They come from needless power abuse and demand forced work, murdering, torture and rape.
Actions lead to reactions/consequences. Our reality is worse/more chaotic because of this.
Sugar. People don’t realize how bad it is for you and how addictive it is.
Sugar is not bad. Abuse of sugar is bad. Sugar is absolutely fine, as long as one doesn’t exceed. Problem is that in American-inspired diets sugar is everywhere at gigantic doses
Do basic groceries abuse sugar? And I’m not talking about the “organic” ones
Depends on what you mean by “basic groceries.” Produce and generally anything that is not processed or prepackaged is ok, but most anything ready to eat, including any baked goods is likely to be pretty high in sugar.
And just FYI, since glucose, fructose, and sucrose are all naturally occurring, they (and HFCS) are considered organic legally
Sugar does nothing good and its 100% konessential for the human body. You dont need to eat a single carb.
And that includes fiber, which is also a carb.
Fructose is a type of sugar. High fructose corn syrup is almost pure sugar, like honey.
Look no further for the cause of the obesity problem in America. It’s an everything. I bought what I thought were raw sausages and it was even in there.
There’s no such thing as “raw” sausage. Uncooked maybe. But never raw, like carots or stake can be raw.
Sausage is ground meat mixed with all sorts of spices and things. Including yes almost always sugar and salt. Without the extra spices, it’s not sausage anymore. It’s just ground beef, pork, turkey, venison, whatever.
Fructose is typically fine when it’s paired with equal amounts of glucose, like in fruit. Your body has a really hard time processing high concentrations of fructose alone, which is how most sugary food is produced now a days since high fructose is a much cheaper method of sweetening food than a balanced mix of sugars.
Except “high fructose corn syrup” doesn’t really have that high of a concentration of fructose. Standard corn syrup and most fruits have glucose and fructose in a ratio that’s roughly 50:50. HFCS is about 55:45 in favor of fructose, mostly because both sugars are roughly the same stability from a chemical sense, so the enzyme that is used to convert one to the other (glucofructoisomerase, IIRC) can’t really get that far from that 50:50 ratio. There are lots of natural sources that are way higher in fructose (agave nectar is like 90:10 fructose, again IIRC).
And fructose isn’t added to everything because the sugar is cheaper than other sugars (although the government subsidies for corn farmers do make HFCS ridiculously cheap); it’s because our taste buds perceive fructose as sweeter than a similar amount of other simple sugars. So it’s actually cheaper to use HFCS than raw corn syrup or other sugar sources, because your actually need less sugar to get the same taste. It’s really similar to how artificial sweeteners work; a synthetic molecule can trick our taste buds into sending signals to the brain that say “this is sweet” at a rate that’s 80-300x more effective per molecule. A lot of artificial sweeteners do actually have calories when digested, but such a small amount of sweetener gets used that the caloric content gets rounded down to zero. But I digress.
The real issue is that simple sugars are being added in large amounts to EVERYTHING (because they taste good), and processed and prepackaged foods are cheaper to buy and easier than preparing food yourself. HFCS ships easily, has a long shelf life, and puts money in the pockets of corporate farms that prefer to grow one (maybe two) crops over vast swathes of land in the US, which is why it’s everywhere. Not that corn is anything special! You can make a high fructose syrup from nearly any starchy crop. Corn was just in the right place at the right time.
Like with most problems in the US, the real underlying cause is the corporations and government subsidies that ignore sustainability (economic and environmental), as well as the health of the population in favor of profit. Unfortunately, that’s a tougher problem to solve and political and economic reform is a tougher sell for Middle America than making one specific ingredient into a Boogeyman.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Edit: cleaned up autocorrect typos and grammar
This will be the next big class action suit similar to tobacco. Big sugar has been operating just like tobacco, denying negative side effects and lobbying at state and federal levels to stifle bans and regulatory actions.
America is on the verge of a sytemeic failure when it comes to health care, and a lot of that is due to the prevalence of diabetes in our aging population.
Right now one in every three medicare dollars goes towards treating diabetes, a perfectly preventable disease. It’s not sustainable, and it’s literally siphoning off our ability to treat other ailments.
Soda specifically - is something we should be looking closer at in relation to sugar abuse. The number of kids and young adults I see quaffing giant plastic cups of fountain drinks is alarming.
Even worse when they use it to replace water.
Blue light.
It’s one of the markers that your brain uses to control its circadian rhythms. During half of your 24 hour cycle its fine. Our devices push that balance too far though, contributing to stress and insomnia by disrupting that regulatory mechanism.
Wouldn’t be too different from living in the artic circle during the summertime, except without blackout shades and we’re doing it to ourselves with tvs, computers and mobile devices.
RIP everyone who doesn’t live exactly on the ecliptic.
The amount of time which the sun shines has very little to do with half of 24 hours most of the year where I live.
Is coffee dangerous because drinking it at 11pm each night keeps you awake too? I think that’s overstating your case, although I think there is a minor benefit to limiting blue light.
personally, I have all the lights set to turn red an hour after sunset and it has had a much larger effect than limiting screen time at bedtime, which is what most people seem to focus on.
