One pod. One pack. Same nicotine. No warning. Short warnings like this one rotate here.

Hi. Give me a few minutes and I’ll show you what the packaging leaves out.

Show me

Only one of these three comes out ahead. Which?

People argue about vaping while picturing different things. There are three, and the health picture is wildly different for each.

Why doesn’t it make you cough?

Drag it from harsh to smooth.

Throat
burns
Puff
small and shallow
Nicotine you can take in
not much

Nicotine salts smooth out the burn, so a strong dose goes down deep without a cough.

Early e-cigarettes were harsh, so people took small puffs. Salt-based pods arrived in 2015 at 5% strength, and some deliver nicotine into the blood about as fast as a cigarette does.

Pod and disposable users report more dependence than people on older devices. In one US national youth survey, pod users were 77% more likely to report dependence symptoms: irritability, anxiety, poor concentration and cravings when they go without.

Smooth just meant they could turn the dose up.

How many cigarettes is your habit?

0pods a week

0 cigarettes’ worth of nicotine a week. 0 a year.

Add the pods or disposables you get through in a week.

One pod holds roughly a pack of cigarettes’ worth of nicotine. That compares the nicotine only: a pod carries far less tar and fewer of the carcinogens in smoke. The dose that keeps you hooked is the same.

How old are you?

Drag the number sideways, or tap the buttons.

Your age stays on this device.

?

Pick your age to see where your brain is.

Nicotine can harm the developing brain, which keeps maturing until about 25, according to the US Surgeon General and CDC. It interferes with attention, learning, mood and impulse control, and it may make other addictions easier later.

How solid is this?

Much of the detailed mechanism comes from animal studies that show lasting behavioural change. The human evidence is mostly associational. Youth vaping also goes along with depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking in surveys, and it is unclear which comes first: distressed teenagers may simply be more likely to start. What nobody disputes is that no youth nicotine use is considered safe.

Take a breath with me.

Easy. For a lot of people who vape, that breath ends in a cough.

  • 75% more likely to report COPD if you never smoked but vape now.
  • Nearly six times as likely if you vape and smoke.
  • About double the chronic bronchitis symptoms in high-schoolers who vape.
How solid is this?

A 2025 review pooling the studies found moderate-certainty evidence of more respiratory symptoms, COPD, asthma and lung inflammation in people who vape but never smoked, compared with people who never vaped. The bronchitis figure comes from about 2,000 Southern California high-schoolers who vape or have vaped: the persistent cough-and-phlegm kind that doesn’t clear. These are snapshot or short-follow-up studies, so they can’t fully separate vaping from the smoking many people also did. The direction is solid; the exact size is still open.

Take a puff and watch the line.

72 beats a minute120/80 blood pressure

72 and 120/80 are example resting values. The changes come from pooled trials.

Every puff is a small stress test.

Pooled randomised trials show heart rate and blood pressure rise straight after vaping, mostly because of the nicotine. Short-term studies also show stiffer arteries, blood-vessel linings that work less well and platelets that clot more easily.

The part that cuts the other way

A 2025 review in Heart found non-smoking vapers had resting heart rate and blood pressure no different from non-users and lower than smokers, and that switching from cigarettes may improve blood flow. It found no evidence yet linking vaping to heart disease. A 2019 paper claiming vaping caused heart attacks was retracted in 2020, because most of the heart attacks in its data happened before people started vaping. So your heart reacts to every session, though less than it would to a cigarette.

That was one puff.

Look closer at the cloud.

Move the lens over it.

Nothing on the label mentions metal. The coil sheds it anyway.

Chromium, nickel, lead, manganese and aluminium come off the heating coil and go straight into the aerosol you breathe. Higher power and some coil designs make it worse.

  • 25 times more lead in the aerosol than in the liquid it came from.
  • 1 in 2 samples over US safety limits for lead.
  • About 1,000 times more coil metal by the end of a disposable’s life.
How solid is this?

The 25 times figure is a median across 56 users’ own devices. The safety limits are US environmental ones, and nickel, chromium and manganese sat near or above them too. The coil figure is from a 2025 study in which disposables were the worst emitters tested. All of it is directly measured exposure, not modelled, and usually still lower than the metal load from smoking, which is little comfort if you were never going to smoke.

Pb: the symbol for lead.

When will we know if it causes cancer?

Drag the marker into the future.

Year 2. We have data for this.

What’s known

Far fewer carcinogens than smoking. Ex-smokers who only vape have much lower levels of NNAL, a key tobacco lung carcinogen, and lower acrolein, acrylamide and 1,3-butadiene. Still more than people who never vaped.

What isn’t

Whether a lower dose still causes cancer. No confirmed human cancer has been attributed to nicotine vaping alone, but the follow-up is far too short to tell. Cell and animal work shows the aerosol can damage DNA. Plausible, still unproven.

Two experts, two answers

A 2026 review labelled nicotine vaping “likely carcinogenic” on test-tube and animal data. Cancer Research UK says there is no good evidence vaping causes cancer. Both positions can be defended today, which tells you how thin the long-term data is.

You’d be the follow-up study.

In 2019 a lung illness hit young people who vaped. How many ended up in hospital?

Your guess

1,000

2,807 hospitalised or dead. 68 confirmed deaths. Median age 24, across 29 states.

What caused it?

Vitamin E acetate, a thickener added to illicit THC cartridges.

It turned up in the lung fluid of 48 of 51 patients tested and in none of 99 healthy controls. 82% of patients had used THC products; 14% reported nicotine products only.

Calling it a “vaping” outbreak sent people looking at the wrong product. If you buy street carts or THC oil from informal sellers, this one is about you, and the risk hasn’t gone away.

True or false?

Overstated claims backfire. Each one that gets debunked gives the industry an excuse to wave away the real risks. Seven quick ones.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7

1 of 7

One pod holds roughly a pack of cigarettes’ worth of nicotine.

Pregnant? Skip both.

Vaping in pregnancy is linked to slower fetal growth, low birth weight, preterm birth and small-for-gestational-age babies, the same problems linked to smoking. No health authority considers vaping safe in pregnancy.

How solid is this?

Mostly observational and retrospective studies, plus animal work, all pointing the same way. One study tracked the growth gap widening through pregnancy: first femur length, then weight and head circumference. Animal studies suggest flavoured e-liquids may harm fetal development even without nicotine.

If this is you, a midwife has heard it all before. Just ask.

Liquid nicotine can kill a toddler.

A small swallow can be life-threatening for a small child, and at least one US infant has died. In one national analysis, more than 90% of e-liquid poisonings happened to children aged four or under. Bright packs and sweet flavours look like sweets to a small child.

Battery failures account for an estimated 1,000 emergency burn cases in the US: pockets, thighs, faces.

Two things you can fix tonight.

If you vape, how many cigarettes a day do you still smoke?

10 a day

An illustration of what the studies found, not a measured curve.

Vaping plus smoking: about the same risk as smoking alone. Sometimes worse.

“I’ve cut down” is the story that kills people.

Vaping and smoking together is the most common pattern in real life, and it barely reduces risk. Cohort studies find people who do both carry heart and lung risk similar to, and sometimes worse than, smoking alone: the smoke, plus the vapour, plus usually a heavier nicotine habit.

Quitting is hard for a few weeks. Then it’s over.

Day 0

Drag along the line through the first six weeks.

Real withdrawal, then less of it, then none. It typically lasts a few weeks.

In 2025 a randomised trial of 261 people aged 16 to 25 tested a medicine for quitting vaping. Share still off vapes in weeks 9 to 12:

Counselling helps. So do approved medicines: varenicline, bupropion and nicotine-replacement therapy. Ask a doctor, pharmacist or quitline for them by name instead of trying to tough it out alone.

If you smoke and nothing else has worked

The strongest evidence on this page is that nicotine vaping beats patches and gum as a quit aid for smokers: about four extra quitters per hundred, high certainty, from 88 studies. If you go that way, switch completely, get stable, then taper off the vape too. Don’t stay on both.

Nobody is 15 and choosing harm reduction.

Vaping is bad for you. It hooks you on a drug you didn’t need, pushes your heart, irritates your lungs and fills you with metal from a coil, before anyone has 30 years of data on cancer and lung disease.

The one exception is narrow: an adult smoker who switches completely, on the way to stopping altogether. For them it’s a way off cigarettes, and the vape is meant to go next. If you’ve never smoked, and especially if you’re young or pregnant, you have nothing to gain from it.

Last one. Drag across it.

There’s an older you somewhere up ahead. Keep them breathing easy.

Don’t start. If you’ve started, stop. Today is the cheapest day it will ever be.

Where to get help

Ask a doctor, pharmacist or your national quitline about varenicline, bupropion, nicotine-replacement therapy and behavioural support. Under 25? Say so: there is now trial evidence for treating young people specifically. Parents: lock the liquids away tonight.

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