By Marina Green

Are you familiar with the term “lung hit?”

It’s what someone does when they inhale vapor from a vaping device straight into their lungs without letting the vapor linger in their mouth.

“RiP Trippers” explains the technique on this YouTube video, where he not only demonstrates a lung hit but also explains the basics of vaping. “By the end of this video, you are going to know how to vape,” he proclaims.

Aptly titled “How to Vape!” It’s a video that already has netted 2.7 million views.

About 9 million people vape in the U.S. and the biggest market is 18 to 24-year-olds. Yet, young people who recently vaped were 81 percent more likely to experience wheezing than those who never used electronic cigarettes, new research finds.

They also were 78 percent more likely to suffer from shortness of breath, even after adjusting for age, sex, race and other factors, according to the findings. In addition, their odds of having bronchitis-like symptoms were two times more likely than in people who had not vaped in the previous 30 days.

The study evaluated e-cigarette use with self-reported respiratory symptoms in more than 2,000 U.S. teens during a series of annual surveys across four years. Participants were part of the Southern California Children’s Health Study between 2014 and 2018.

Findings remained statistically significant even after adjusting for concurrent use of cigarettes and cannabis and secondhand exposure to e-cigarettes, cigarettes, and/or cannabis.

To blame are aerosols produced in e-cigarettes, which contain volatile aldehydes, including flavorings and oxidant metals, known to damage the lungs, according to the study published in Thorax, which was partially funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

“The study contributes to emerging evidence from human and toxicological studies that e-cigarettes cause respiratory symptoms that warrant consideration in regulation of e-cigarettes,” the researchers wrote. 

E-cigarettes and vaping systems have only been in the U.S. for about 15 years, so there hasn’t been adequate study of their long-term effects, experts say. Meanwhile, the number of teens and young adults who vape has grown exponentially in recent years. For instance, e-cigarette use more than doubled from 2017 to 2019 among middle and high school students. 

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s 2023 Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey found that 7.7 percent of U.S. high students reported current use of e-cigarettes. Of those who used the products, more than 1 in 4 said they did so daily. 

Vaping products are battery operated devices that heat a liquid solution so that it forms an aerosol which can then be inhaled into the lungs. Far cheaper than cigarettes, vaping devices cost between $15 and $50 and can provide as many as 10,000 “hits,” although 300-800 is a more typical number. There also are disposable versions which are even less expensive. 

Although the study linking vaping and lung conditions in youth is  “interesting” to Jon Foster, policy manager at Lung + UK, he told PA Media that additional research is needed since regulation on nicotine and chemicals allowed in e-cigarettes is far stricter in the U.K. than in the U.S., so findings could be very different there. 

An American Heart Association scientific statement released in July warned that the current science on  e-cigarettes calls for additional research on their long-term impacts. That study should address not only potential damage to lungs but also to the heart and blood vessels.  

“E-cigarettes deliver numerous substances into the body that are potentially harmful, including chemicals and other compounds that are likely not known to or understood by the user,” said the volunteer chair of the scientific statement writing committee, Jason J. Rose, M.D., M.B.A., an associate professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. 

In addition, “There is research indicating that nicotine-containing e-cigarettes are associated with acute changes in several hemodynamic measures, including increases in blood pressure and heart rate,” he said in an American Heart Association post. 

Even absent the nicotine, there is evidence that the flavorings, sweeteners and propylene glycol and vegetable glycerol, may each independently pose their own dangerous health risks. 

Flavorings – nearly 8,000 different varieties at last count – are precisely one of the most appealing characteristics of e-cigarettes, according to some users. People like to swap them at parties and in bars to sample new flavors like bacon, or mango, custard, gummy bear or chocolate, which they may not have tried before. 

In fact, if you believe RiP Trippers, “smoking is dead.”  

“Vaping is the future, and the future is now,” he says.