I Just Had To Comment On This, It Made Me Mad

[EternalSoil]

Ok, I know one of the first comments is going to be something like "WTF? That game is stupid" or something along that line. But i was searching FF add-on's and saw it so I tried it.

Anyways, So the "mission" takes you from HookahCompany to Wikipedia (refrencing the health issues section at the bottom) to This Honolulu Ad. page and finally to This Natural News page.

I got mad and ranted (twice) about this.

Now I really wanna get with an organization, and maybe a few members on here, and do a real study involving hookahs and cigarettes about the health risks in comparison.

[Hobbs]

Honestly I've been thinking and trying to figure out ways to disprove such things but I'm at a relative loss. I considered checking the pH of the base water before and after, just to see if anything was interesting. Tried to get a hold of carbon filters and rig up a vacuum to filter about an hour of hookah smoke and see if it turned black/yellow... ended up not finding filters and my vacuum broke though.

If you can think of any test/studies let me know, I'd be glad to help... I just don't have a high tech lab, just a naturally inquisitive personality.

[mattarios2]

anything you have in mind or need help with, count me in!

[EternalSoil]

Well, to get an accurate representation, a whole lot will have to go into the study.

Temperatures
Chemicals in them before and after
Chemicals released
pH balance before and after
Does the water filter out anything (smoking without water)
Does the temperature of the water have any effect?
Different types of tobacco (probably wouldn't want to test with traditional types)
Different coals
Maybe even throw in some herbal shisha to test depending on how long each test takes
and many other things

[Codename067]

What do you propose ES? Let us know.

[EternalSoil]

Haha! Man, I'm almost regretting bringing an actual study up.

I don't really have the time to dedicate to it. 14hrs in college and full time at work.

I also don't know where i would go to start a study.

How much would it cost to do a study on this anyways?
Carcinogens? how much does it cost to determine those?! I am not made of moneys!

IDK guys, maybe I'll get really into this after you guys talk me into it and start doing a lot of research to get something going.

[jhanzair]

I've tried smoking without water, just to see what happened, some time ago. It was *awful*. So the water definitely filters out something. I can test the water in the base for pH, ammonia, nitrites and nitrates, but i don't think that will be actually useful. Now testing the temperature right below the foil, that would be really useful, if someone has a Thermometer that can take those temperatures, because the temperature of burning is highly influential in the amount of harmful chemicals released.

[JDHarding]

If smoking hookah is worse than smoking cigarettes, then why is it I cough and hack when smoking a cig, even WITH a filter, but I don't with a hookah, without any filter. Hmmmmmmmmmm???

I know cigar smoking is even worse because I've tried cigars and I can only puff 'em, I can't inhale them at all without barfing up a lung.

[jhanzair]

Actually, it would be curious to smoke through a cigarette filter, just to see if it's yellow and nasty after a while.

[MeHT]

Unless you're willing to kill a bunch of mice with hookah and cigarette smoked, I doubt you can conduct a definive study.

[Hobbs]

Well, to get an accurate representation, a whole lot will have to go into the study.

Temperatures
Chemicals in them before and after
Chemicals released
pH balance before and after
Does the water filter out anything (smoking without water)
Does the temperature of the water have any effect?
Different types of tobacco (probably wouldn't want to test with traditional types)
Different coals
Maybe even throw in some herbal shisha to test depending on how long each test takes
and many other things

I'll work on coming up with ways to do a couple of these.. some of them though I can tell you now I'll have no way of accomplishing. Such as chemicals.. I think I can do temperatures however, pH, possibly water filter.

[EternalSoil]

You're not supposed to inhale cigars....

I would want to test temperatures of the coal, right under the coal, top of the downstem, and right out of the hose port.
Also the chemicals at all those places too.

[MeHT]

Actually, it would be curious to smoke through a cigarette filter, just to see if it's yellow and nasty after a while.

I'm pretty sure it will be. Actually, I've got some filters for hand-rolled cigs so that what I'm going to do in a bit.

[JDHarding]

I can't seem to find the video on youtube, but these two guys did a filter comparison between a hookah and a cigarette. They built a filter out of cottonballs, then smoked the hookah through it and a filtered cig through it. The cig gave off a lot of yellow gunk in the balls, but the hookah gave off nothing. The yellow gunk is probably tar or something, but personally I think tar is what causes people to get mouth, esophagus, and lung cancer because it helps the chemicals stick to internal tissues. I dunno about heart disease. That could be caused by the chemicals in nicotine. *shrug*

[Hobbs]

Tar contains chemicals in and of itself. It also sticks with you for some time. There was a vid of a guy who filtered a carton of cigs through water, then boiled the water and had a handfull of tar the size of a softball left over.

[redjako]

I'd imagine at least 50k for a "professional" study with a potential peer-reviewed published journal article.


Most of these stupid studies involve a pump sucking at a constant rate on the hose, long past the shisha's point of goodness...so the pump is just smoking burnt shisha.

How many people just sit there for 6 hours sucking on burnt shit? Its too harsh for people.

[Mndgame]

I think we can all agree that smoking hookah is definitely worse for you than not smoking hookah. Also, even if smoking hookah is as bad as smoking cigarettes there are a lot of factors that go into calculating the amount you really smoke. I mean, if you are smoking with a couple of friends you spend a very small amount of the time actually yourself smoking/inhaling. Secondly, hookah smokers generally do not smoke multiple times a day 5+ days a week like many cigarette smokers I know. A lot of studies I see are factoring in that you are smoking 45 min sessions by yourself multiple times a week. If you smoke that much, by yourself, on a regular basis, you probably have more problems than just the smoking. Also, isn't most sheesha tar-free?

The problem with the study people are proposing is you need to set some kind of metric or measure. You can't measure is hookah 'bad' for you or how 'bad' is hookah for you. Also, I think a good study would be something that actually showed results over time which takes a lot of money/time to do. Like effects on lung capacity (or other measures of lung healthiness), results of chest x-rays over 5 years or so of a non-smoker, hookah smoker, cigarette smoker. Analyzing the chemicals would be a good start, though.

The fact is smoking tobacco in any form is bad for your health. Hookah seems to be better because people usually smoke less frequently, tobacco contains less harmful things, and it isn't heated as much.

All in all no matter what studies are done it isn't going to change how it effects your health itself so relax and enjoy your hookah

[MeHT]

Just tried smoking through a cig filter, after 5 mins of heavy pulling (it's hard!) I looked at it and it seemed quite clean.

[Sonthert]

Why are cigarettes dangerous?

They have ammonia added to them (not all, but most do) and in conjunction with the pyrolysis of the various organic chemicals, carcinogens are produced.

Is hookah dangerous?

Hookah doesn't have ammonia added to it (at least not Tangiers). So the question is does pyrolysis occur to a degree that a significant amount of carcinogens are produced?

According to the older Surgeon General's Reports, mortality rates in pipe smokers are the same as for non-smokers, thats a brier pipe burning tobacco, assuming that (it may be a dangerous assumption) getting cancer increases your mortality rate, it would follow that pipe smokers aren't getting cancer often. So perhaps burning tobacco isn't sufficient to make jacked up carcinogens. Maybe ammonia or some other processing step in cigarette manufacture increases the carcinogenic nature of cigarettes from just burning tobacco.

That being said, hookah could be, in some fashion, more carcinogenic than cigarettes, I'm saying brier pipes and burning tobacco aren't as deadly as cigarettes. Tobacco burning doesn't occur too much in hookah tobacco outside Jurak and Tombac, so it suggests that all the existing data is irrelevant to other types of burning tobacco. People chewing dip still get cancer, so....?????

[Sylren]

Well, the thing about cigarettes that makes them so dangerous isn't necessarily the fact that they are tobacco, but the amount of chemicals added to them to make them more addictive. Cyanide? Formaldehyde? Ammonia? So gross. I also wonder about the shishas that are produced by the big tobacco companies, are they putting those same chemicals in?

[EternalSoil]

I believe with pipe smoking, you do not inhale either like you do with cigarettes and hookahs. Thus we may push to the side (not rule out) mouth type diseases. I agree with redjako in his assumption that previous studies probably just have a vacuum sucking on a hose for hours on end while taking results.

Mndgame, i agree with you that [most] people don't smoke hookah 5 times a day or more like cigarette smokers. My thoughts are that they refer to volume of smoke produced in one hookah session is greater than the volume of smoke produced in smoking a full pack of cigarettes. Which is true.. hell in my case, i would say the volume of smoke produced in one bowl of shisha from me is that closer to a carton or more of cigarettes. As far as tar is concerned, shisha is "tar free" because no tar is added, however, when heated, it produces it.

We all can agree that smoking shisha from a hookah is bad for our health. That much is true.
However, the reason behind this is that the studies that have been done state that one hookah session is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes or more.

[Hobbs]

The thing is their morals don't lie with getting the most accurate representation of what really is going on. They are more interested in keeping people from using tobacco products. So therefore it is still a correct statement that 1 hookah session is equivalent to a pack of cigarettes -in the volume of smoke produced-... however, they leave that last part out of their news articles, leaving people to think that hookah smoke contains everything cigarette smoke does.

If someone put out a valid statement that concluded that hookah smoke contains 0 of the chemicals cigarettes have, then all hell would break loose.

[JDHarding]

I don't smoke hookah enough to be too concerned with any health risks. Once every other day isn't gonna kill me. It's not the same as smoking a pack or two of cigs a day. So whatever the studies say or don't say I'm still gonna smoke my hookah.

[tinyj316]

I think that the "simple" way to test the contents would be to make liquid smoke and do a toxicity screening on the liquids. Most commercial liquid smoke (cooking applications) is filtered of any carcinogens that might linger from the burning of wood; however to pull this off properly, you wouldn't want to filter it.

You would have to do this two separate ways in order for it to be "valid" (as far as I can tell). First, you would have to hook a vacuum/bellows of some kind to the end of either the mouthpiece or cigarette, and have the vacuum empty into a condenser which would flow into a beaker. The second way would require you to actually inhale as you normally would and then exhale into the condenser.

That's the best stab I can take at it ATM, but I think this would make for an excellent starting point

[tinyj316]

I just thought of another "test" that could be done. Not sure how easy it would be to do, but it might prove valid in some schools of thought.

1) go to your local butcher and ask for 2 pairs of cow/sheep/deer lungs
2) Hook the lungs and cigarette/hookah up to some sort of bellows system to make them "breathe"
3) ?????
4) Profit!

This of course would be a good test to see what the smoke volume has to do with tar build-ups over the span of 1 pack/1 bowl, 1 carton/10 bowls, etc.