Healthy Smoking Alternatives and Their Benefits

Decades ago, the Surgeon General had warnings attached to cigarettes letting smokers know the risks and dangers that smoking tobacco products could have. From lung cancer to birth defects, there are many reasons to stop smoking traditional cigarettes and look into some other options.

Recently, many alternatives to traditional smoking have hit the market, and most of them cost far less than traditional cigarettes. So, not only will adopting healthy smoking alternatives be healthy for your body, it will also be healthy for your pocket.

Before the induction of the e-cigarette and the term ‘vaping,’ which was one of the words of the year this year, there were hookahs. If you’ve never heard of a hookah, it is an oriental tobacco pipe. It has a long and flexible tube. This tube draws smoke through a bowl of water. People traditionally sit around a hookah pipe and smoke their choice of tobacco. However, even hookahs have moved away from the use of tobacco.

Meyer Monday - Revisited: By Jörg Schubert
Meyer Monday – Revisited: By Jörg Schubert

Nowadays, you can opt for electronic hookahs, which are far more portable than the original kind. These hookah styles even come in a pen style, much like the vapor e-cigs. Both use similar e-juice or liquid in place of tobacco.

With hookahs and with vapor e-cigs you can try different flavors. You’ll find options like menthol, regular, vanilla, coffee, cherry, apple, clove and more. You can find the e-liquids nicotine free or pick from different levels of nicotine. The ones containing nicotine are a great source for those people who are trying to quit smoking.

All of these options, including the traditional e-cigarettes that look similar to a real cigarette, emit a vapor instead of smoke, so you aren’t harming others with your second hand smoke. They are easy to carry and store. Most of them come with chargers for recharging the batteries so that you don’t have to worry about ever having a dead e-cig.

Some other benefits of these alternative options to smoking are that they don’t have the stink of traditional cigarettes. There is no tar, which means you aren’t coating your lungs with yet another carcinogenic substance.

A pen size smoking alternative will also help give the potential quitter a device that feels similar to a cigarette. Part of the addiction process with smoking is psychological, it’s not all about the nicotine addiction. Being able to hold the e-cig or electronic hookah in your hand, and puff it on your lips like a normal cigarette helps trick your mind into thinking it’s get that cigarette without introducing those poisons into your body.

2 Comments

  1. Yismel RosarioMarch 10, 2015

    How odd is it to stumble upon an e-cig article twice in a day? Apparently is a hot topic nowadays. Just this morning I was reading in the newspaper Express an article tittled “Vaping on Metro only breaks etiquette laws” talking about the social perspective on smoking and how it is negatively perceived in society to smoke an e-cig in a place that is smoke free.

    Nevertheless, your article brings a positive view to the e-cig that I was not aware of, such as the fact that you can choose different levels of nicotine and add flavors to it. It seems to me that the e-cig can easily be used as a method to quit smoking as one could gradually reduce the amount of nicotine consumed while tricking the brain into the smoking-feels-good sensation and the relaxation many find in the mere activity. I am sure if more people understood how the e-cig works and how it can actually serve as an improvement to the life of many smokers society could shift its norms and beliefs around smoking and maybe in a future it would not break etiquette laws on the metro (or any other place).

  2. NateMarch 18, 2015

    Super interesting read. I would like to see more of an acceptance to e-cigarettes in public environments, as to encourage traditional smokers to make that switch. I think it is definitely a process, to first of all have the desire to quit and then to wind yourself off them slowly. If you rush quitting, it will not last very long. Better slow than never I always! How about you? What are your experiences with quitting tobacco or the e-cigarette?

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