Man shows how a month of vaping versus smoking affects your lungs in telling experiment
Smoking vs vaping is often a fevered debate, but one man's amateur experiment may have settled it for good.
YouTuber Chris Notap set up a nifty contraption for a video he posted in 2017 to simulate the impact a month of smoking has on the body compared with a month of vaping.
The results are startling and have been viewed a gigantic 47 million times, even if Notap admits his experiment isn't a scientifically sound one.
Notap - who has more than 1.07 million subscribers on his channel - set up two bell jars filled with cotton wool balls to represent the human lungs.
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A little hole was cut into the jar to represent the mouth, with an exhaling air tube inserted to act as a person's throat, with the whole gizmo connected to an engine to simulate breathing.
He then fed one jar 600 individual cigarettes (that must have cost a bomb) and the other 120ml of e-liquid juice and let it rip.
It doesn't take long to see the shocking difference between smoking a packet of cigs a day over a month compared to using the vape.
The cotton buds in the cigarette jar soon began to turn yellow and before long you couldn't even see them at all as the glass soon became stained and singed with the constant inhalation of smoke.
It was tough to see through the vape jar, too, with the vapour soon clouding it up, but its effects were nowhere near as long-lasting.
The difference between a month of smoking vs a month of vaping
Notap then poured out the respective cotton buds, with the smoker one all a blackish yellow and charred, while the vape ones remained pristine white. When he rubbed them on a piece of paper, the smoking cotton left a brownish smear, whereas there was hardly anything from the vape ones.
The jars were in different states, too, with the vape one wet from condensation but mostly clean. The smoke jar was caked in soot and dirt.
Then came the tubes and the stark differences were even more pronounced.
While there was a bit of clear liquid in the vaping tube, the smoking one was full of black, sticky tar you could probably pave a road with.
No wonder smoking gives you a cough at best and a whole array of ailments at worst.
Explaining his experiment, Notap said: "The simplicity of the white cotton balls visually shows what is possibly going in your lungs and what your body has to deal with.
"The chamber was cleared of smoke between each and every cigarette, allowing air to enter. The smoke was drawn through and around the cotton, catching some and not all of the junk and tar.
"This is evident by the accumulation in the hoses. Each cigarette was smoked 3/4 of the way to reflect real world smoking, allowing a quarter of it to just burn away while talking or thinking."
Notap did film the experiment over three days, which isn't quite representative of how a person would actually smoke over a month, yet it remains an indicator of the effect it has under the surface.
How the experiment smelled
One difference the video was unable to show, though, was the odour of the jars. It certainly didn't smell of roses, that's for sure.
"The smell inside the dome at the end was vile," Notap added. "After shooting three days of video, I felt quite ill afterwards. Can't imagine how a smoker feels on a daily basis."
Notap did warn that vaping can have its own side effects, too, and urged people who don't already smoke to never pick up the habit, as it should only be used to help nicotine addicts ditch cigs for good.
Smoking is proven to cause a number of serious health problems, including cancers, heart disease, damage to the senses, high blood pressure and even the risk of dementia.
Daniel Murphy