What’s the Healthiest Way to Use Vape Juice?
One of the most profound differences between vaping and smoking is that there isn’t just one way to vape. When you vape, you have a myriad of choices including what equipment you use, what vape juice flavor you use, what nicotine strength you use, how often you vape and more. When you consider all of the different hardware and e-liquid options, there are millions of ways to vape. On the other hand, there’s only one way to smoke because all cigarettes are essentially the same.
The fact that there are so many different ways to vape is particularly interesting because it means that some ways of vaping are healthier than others. Exactly what those ways are isn’t fully known yet because the safety profile of vaping still requires a great deal of research. However, there are some aspects of safety with vape juice that we definitely know for sure. For instance, consuming less nicotine is obviously better than consuming more.
Based on the information that’s available, it’s possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the healthiest way to use vape juice – and we’re going to discuss those in this article. Although many medical experts agree that vaping seems to carry less risk than smoking, it’s definitely safe to say that vaping still carries more risk than not using nicotine at all. With that in mind, here are some things that can potentially reduce your risk when using vape juice.
Vape in a Way That Minimizes Your Total E-Liquid Consumption
When it comes to the potential health concerns of using vape juice, there are a lot of things that we don’t know yet. The risks of using nicotine are well known, but nicotine is just one ingredient of e-liquid. There’s also vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol and flavoring agents – and although vaping has been around for about a decade and a half at this point, we still don’t know much about the safety of inhaling those ingredients. Based on that, it stands to reason that the safest way to use vape juice is by consuming the smallest possible amount that still allows you to have a satisfying experience.
The best way to keep your total vape juice consumption down is by using an e-liquid with a high nicotine strength, and the easiest way to do that is by using disposable vapes or a small pod-based device. Small vaping devices are designed to provide a good experience with high-strength nicotine salt e-liquid, which can give you the same nicotine kick as a cigarette with just a few puffs. If you only need to use your vaping device a handful of times each day, you’ll consume very little vape juice overall.
Try Unflavored E-Liquid
If you’ve been vaping for a long time, there’s a good chance that you graduated from small disposable vapes and pod systems a while ago and are currently using a larger vape mod. In this case, you probably don’t want to go back to a smaller device because that would require you to change your vaping setup completely. Although it’s difficult to reduce your total e-liquid consumption when you use a powerful vape mod, there is something else that you can do: You can use e-liquid with the fewest possible ingredients instead. To do that, you’ll just need to switch to unflavored vape juice.
Using unflavored e-liquid may not sound like a lot of fun to you on the surface, but you might be surprised by the quality of the experience. Nicotine isn’t flavorless – it tastes a bit bitter and peppery. Vegetable glycerin, meanwhile, is slightly sweet. Many people find that those ingredients actually taste quite good together, and they end up not missing the added flavors at all.
If you don’t want to use unflavored vape juice, you should at least steer clear of e-liquids with creamy or buttery flavor notes. These flavor notes can potentially come from diacetyl, which is one of the few flavoring ingredients that’s known to be unsafe for inhalation. Even if a creamy or buttery e-liquid doesn’t use diacetyl as a flavoring agent, it may use another compound with a similar molecular structure such as acetyl propionyl. These compounds – known as diketones – are all widely thought to be unsafe for inhalation.
Try to Reduce Your Nicotine Intake
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, nicotine is one of the few vape juice ingredients with health risks that are actually known – so if you can reduce your nicotine consumption, that’s definitely a good thing. Try buying a vaping device with a built-in puff counter, so you can see how many puffs you take each day. Reducing your intake by just a few puffs per day is an easy way to lower your nicotine consumption. Alternatively, you could keep the number of puffs the same but switch to an e-liquid with a lower nicotine strength. Reducing your nicotine intake could even help you quit vaping entirely one day if you want to do that.
Vape at the Lowest Possible Wattage
One important thing to understand about vaping is that it’s possible for a vaping device to emit toxic compounds like formaldehyde at high power levels. Scientific studies have produced conflicting information about this, with at least one study concluding that formaldehyde emissions from vaping are minimal – and much lower than the emissions from smoking – under real-world vaping conditions. There definitely seems to be a correlation, though, between heat levels and formaldehyde emissions in vaping. To minimize those emissions, you should set your vaping device to the lowest possible wattage that still produces an enjoyable experience.
Use Vape Hardware That’s Undergone Heavy Metal Testing
Don’t forget that your choice of vape juice isn’t the only thing that can affect your safety when vaping. Vape coils have metal heating elements, so it’s important to be as certain as possible about the metal’s composition. You definitely don’t want to inhale heavy metal particles when you vape. It’s becoming increasingly popular for vape manufacturers to use materials like medical-grade stainless steel in their vape coils, which should be very pure. If you can find a vape manufacturer that actually tests its products for heavy metals, that’s even better.
