Many young adults and teens think that vaping or using e-cigarettes is safe. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Vaping exposes users to around 2,000 chemicals, including potentially harmful industrial compounds, according to a study of four popular brands by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

The researchers found that “most of the chemicals found were unidentified, but of those that were, six were cause for concern.”

Most alarming was the fact that they “found condensed hydrocarbon-like compounds.”

The big deal about that is that these chemicals “are typically associated with traditional combustion products like cigarettes, despite the fact that vaping is often marketed as safer than those products.”

A senior author of the study wrote,

“People [who vape] just need to know that they’re inhaling a very complex mixture of chemicals. And for a lot of these compounds, we have no idea what they actually are.”

Carsten Prasse, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins

He added,

“Existing research that compared e-cigarettes with normal cigarettes found that cigarette contaminants are much lower in e-cigarettes. Again, the problem is that e-cigarette aerosols contain other completely uncharacterized chemicals that might have health risks that we don’t yet know about.”

The study was published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

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