So there’s this study that’s been flying around on formaldehyde in e-cigarettes…it’s been quoted and printed all throughout the world and almost every article has had a headline along the lines of ‘e-cigarettes worse than smoking’ or even more disturbing ‘e-cigarettes 10x worse than smoking’ as one Japanese paper displayed in their headline. This is propaganda at its most abhorrent and has involved twisting an interesting study to meet the agenda of certain interests that clearly do not value scientific findings or the public's health.
Joe Nocera highlights the injustice in this article printed in the New York Times that explains that the results of this study are very promising and actually in favour of e-cigarettes. No formaldehyde was found in e-cigarettes that use a standard voltage (essentially all e-cigarettes including our models). Only very high voltages (not typically used) produced any form of formaldehyde.
To interpret this finding to suggest that e-cigarettes are worse than cigarettes is scaremongering and very damaging to people’s perceptions. E-cigarettes could be the single biggest public health prize in history and these types of articles need to stop.
Scientific evidence suggests that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful than conventional cigarettes.
What The Studies Really Said About Electronic Cigarettes
A study from 2014 and another from 2015 reported that formaldehyde was found in e-cigarettes. Analysing the studies and their findings, we see that the first study actually reported between 13 and 807 times less formaldehyde than is found in cigarettes, which is obviously a good thing for smokers that switch to e-cigs. However, the study also noted that one brand of e-cig in particular (definitely not ours) released more formaldehyde than a cigarette when it overheated. The key here is that the e-cig "overheated", which as the study's results show is not something that typically happens with modern e-cigarettes.
The other study reached a similar conclusion in regard to overheating, as the study's authors reported that e-cigs can produce higher levels when they overheat.
In order to reach these findings, the study's authors did something that hardly makes sense from a reasonable perspective: they used a vaping machine that continuously puffed on the e-cigs (chain vaping). As a result, the devices overheated from what may have been a failure on the part of the manufacturers of the devices to ensure that their products were designed with safeguards to prevent overheating. Is this a realistic scenario? Almost certainly not. In real life, vapers don't continuously use their e-cigarettes without taking a break - not even heavy vapers are likely to use their devices to the same extent and with the same level of aggressive use as the vaping machined used in these studies. That said, the studies in question and their findings should probably be taken with more than a grain of salt.
Public Health England's e-cigarette evidence review has found e-cigarettes to likely be significantly less harmful than conventional cigarettes.
