Interesting Article I Just Found

[Sin on Sunday]

Was researching effects of smoking hookah on people who recently quit smoking (anyone care to chime in? buddy of mine just quit cigs, not sure if he should smoke hookah) and I found this article about health risks, seems like fairly reputable sources.

I guess hookah has 36x more tar than cigs (probably not scaled for smoking amount though) which I admit scared me but maybe not enough to quit.

[font="arial, sans-serif"][size="2"]http://hookahviews.com/health.php[/size][/font]

[Hassouni]

[quote name='Sin on Sunday' timestamp='1301266935' post='503223']
Was researching effects of smoking hookah on people who recently quit smoking (anyone care to chime in? buddy of mine just quit cigs, not sure if he should smoke hookah) and I found this article about health risks, seems like fairly reputable sources.

I guess hookah has 36x more tar than cigs (probably not scaled for smoking amount though) which I admit scared me but maybe not enough to quit.

[font="arial, sans-serif"][size="2"][url="http://hookahviews.com/health.php"]http://hookahviews.com/health.php[/url][/size][/font]
[/quote]

If you believe that, I suggest you smoke 36 cigs back to back and see how you feel

[Coleman]

well idk they were basing it around the 1 cigarette and 1 hookah session. Had they been doing a different test I might be more inclined to read it but these 2 things are not equal. That comparison is like comparing a vespa scooter and a formula 1 car they are not the same. Sorry to be a party pooper but that is just my 0.02 cents

[snugz13]

in the article it says that hookah has more tar then cigarettes but on all of the shisha containers I buy say that it has 0.0% tar. I dont understand how that is possible because from my understanding tar is produced when the tobacco is burned or lit on fire such as a cigarette, but I think that the coals on hookah are just heating up or cooking the tobacco therefore not producing tar. Someone correct me if Im wrong for thinking that.

[king_lunchb0x]

http://www.thewell.vcu.edu/docs/hookah_compare_chart.pdf
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,844277,00.html
http://www.hookahforum.com/topic/1822-a-study-on-hookah-smoke/
-- http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=166277 --
-- http://knol.google.com/k/a-critique-of-waterpipe-tobacco-smoking-an-emerging-health-crisis-in-the-united# --- this guy Kamal Chaouachi, a Paris-based hookah and tobacco researcher with a Ph.D. in tobacco science is fighting back
"The participants abstained from water pipe smoking for 84 hours before taking part in the study; the bowls of their water pipes were filled with water and 10 grams of Al Fakher mu'assal tobacco, then heated with charcoal.

Researchers monitored carbon monoxide in the breath of the participants both before and after the experiment using a machine designed to detect if people are smokers.

The findings were published in a letter in the Jan. 2 issue of the [i]Journal of the American Medical Association[/i].

The exhaled carbon monoxide in participants was an average of 42 parts per million, higher than that reported in cigarette smokers (17 parts per million). The study also found that carbon monoxide levels grew in the room where the subjects smoked hookahs and might reach environmentally unhealthy levels, as determined by the federal government, during longer sessions.

Hammond said she can't directly compare hookah use to the smoking of cigarettes, which house thousands of toxic chemicals. And, she said, it's hard to know exactly what hookah use will mean in terms of higher risk of lung or heart disease.

Hookahs "may not give you lung cancer but may compromise your health in other ways," she said.

Thomas Eissenberg, an associate professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies hookah use, said research has suggested that smoking a water pipe for 45 minutes produces 36 times more tar than smoking a cigarette for five minutes. Tar -- or "nicotine-free, dry particulate matter" -- contains the cancer-causing constituents of the smoke, although it's not clear if water pipe tar is different from cigarette tar, he said."

[king_lunchb0x]

cant edit but heres a quote
"

[b]Hookah and Tar[/b]
Hookah tar and cigarette tar are completely different from each other (taboo talk). The question of temperatures is of utmost importance because of its tremendous consequences [url="http://knol.google.com/k/kamal-chaouachi/hookah-faq-frequently-asked-questions/534k6mvefph/10#references"][18][/url]. This important fact was not acknowledged in the WHO (World Health Organisation) flawed report in which the ""waterpipe"" experts "gave to understand" to the world that cigarette and hookah could be compared on this basis [url="http://knol.google.com/k/kamal-chaouachi/hookah-faq-frequently-asked-questions/534k6mvefph/10#references"][17][/url]. Such an attitude is unethical and anti-scientific. See also the [url="http://knol.google.com/k/a-critique-of-waterpipe-tobacco-smoking-an-emerging-health-crisis-in-the-united#The_Tar_Fraud_and_the_Unnecessary_CO_Scare%20"]relevant section[/url] of a recent Knol on this issue.
The confusion is huge. US-American University of Beirut ""waterrpipe"" antismoking researchers even believe (this was published in a respectable peer-reviewed scientific journal...) that tar can be found in the tobacco leaves (cigarettes) or the very moassel (tobacco-molasses smoking mixture)[url="http://knol.google.com/k/kamal-chaouachi/hookah-faq-frequently-asked-questions/534k6mvefph/10#references"][62][/url]. However, tobacco researchers worthy of this name know that [b]tar only appears when tobacco is burnt[/b]...."

--another good link http://www.tobaccoinduceddiseases.com/content/5/1/16/comments -- Edited March 28, 2011 by king_lunchb0x

[flydigital55]

[quote name='snugz13' timestamp='1301267818' post='503226']
in the article it says that hookah has more tar then cigarettes but on all of the shisha containers I buy say that it has 0.0% tar. I dont understand how that is possible because from my understanding tar is produced when the tobacco is burned or lit on fire such as a cigarette, but I think that the coals on hookah are just heating up or cooking the tobacco therefore not producing tar. Someone correct me if Im wrong for thinking that.
[/quote]


As you will learn, if you look, most reports/studies are BS and completely ignore the temperature at which the shisha is "burned" or rather "heated". If you do not reach combustion temp of the ingredients in shisha, you will not encounter significant levels of tar (Total Aerosol Residue). TAR is basically resinous particulate that is created when something becomes partially combusted. If you light your shisha on fire, drop the coal directly on the tobacco, etc, then yes you are going to get lots of tar. Most everything has potential "TAR" in it. But since you are not burning it, it has little meaning for us.

This fact, and many, many others are completely ignored in such studies. Basically anything and everything which does not accomplish the goals, which are usually to create emotional responses that further anti-tobacco political agendas. Great example of how politics work, or rather, don't work. I could give you at least 20 examples of recent legislation enacted, in several different areas from Fishing and hunting to commercial aviation based on such "studies" which misinterpret or ignore important scientific facts in order to cause dramatized media response and ultimately, political support to further these agendas. Divide and conquer. This is how things are done.

/rant

[king_lunchb0x]

sorry to keep posting and posting but keep finding interesting stuff discrediting these "studies"


[b][font="Verdana"][size="2"][b]The Tar Fraud and the Unnecessary CO Scare[/b][/size][/font][/b]
[font="Verdana"][size="2"][url="http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/534k6mvefph/v2hq1o/table2cobbajhb.jpg"][img]http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/534k6mvefph/v2hq1o/table2cobbajhb.jpg[/img][/url]Table 2 looks like a rectangle on a cigarette pack… It is entitled: [i]"Machine-generated Smoke Content Using Realistic Puff Parameters for a Single [/i] Waterpipe Episode and a Single Cigarette"[/size][/font]

[font="Verdana"][size="2"][b]1. First aspect of the fraud[/b]. Glycerol is a major component of tar. What few people know, including many researchers, is that the proportion of the former is actually included in the tar yield figure. So, when antismoking brandish an artificially obtained tar yield of 802 mg, free citizens are entitled to ask them, not only to stress that cigarette tar and hookah tar are quantitatively and qualitatively completely different from each other, but, also, concerning the latter aspect, that 40% of the tar is made up of glycerol, a biologically inactive substance [[b]1[/b]]. Also, what ““waterpipe”” researchers never say is that hookah smoke is also made up of water in a similar proportion as glycerol. In these conditions, water and glycerol are the main components of hookah smoke (when used with moassel). In spite of this prevalent unscientific blackout, this important point was published in peer-reviewed journals [[b]1[/b]]. [/size][/font]

[font="Verdana"][size="2"][b]2. Second aspect of the fraud[/b]. The “smoking machine” was absolutely not “realistic”. It has been criticised in peer-reviewed journals for its numerous biases: unrealistic set-up and not less unrealistic puffing parameters [[b]2[/b]].[/size][/font]

[font="Verdana"][size="2"][b]3. Third aspect of the fraud[/b]. The hookah and cigarette yields (i.e. the figures in the table) were obtained through the use of two completely different smoking machines [[b]2[/b]].[/size][/font]

[font="Verdana"][size="2"][b]4. Fourth aspect of the fraud[/b]. Averaging the smoking behaviour has been performed for only 5 minutes in the case of cigarettes. In the case of hookah, the events occurring during a full hour (60 min) session have been averaged. This is mathematically and epistemologically unacceptable [[b]1[/b]]. [/size][/font]

[font="Verdana"][size="2"][b]Concerning Carbon Monoxide (CO) supposed to be “6.5 times” the [cigarette] CO”, hookah users and non-users may have already understood the underlying tricky propaganda. ““Waterpipe”” actually experts deceive the general public by crudely comparing CH CO intake (as cigarette use implies) with sporadic absorption (one or several times a day). Indeed, another fact that is systematically hidden by antismokers is that, fortunately for hookah users, the half-life of CO is very short. This means that this dangerous gas is relatively quickly flushed out of the body. Since the BBC unethical scare of last Autumn, the general public seems more and more mature regarding this topic [/b][[b]3[/b]][[b]4[/b]]. [/size][/font]

[font="Verdana"][size="2"]To close this chapter, Cobb et al cite a US study about CO without noting a striking conflict of interest on behalf of the co-author, Katharine Hammond [[b]5[/b]]. On the one hand, the latter is a member of WHO TobReg, the group of experts who have “peer-reviewed” and validated the WHO flawed report [[b]6[/b]]. On the other, the co-author should have disclosed that she actually is an “Exposure Assessment Research investigator” for the UCSF FAMRI Center because FAMRI officially funds research on diseases caused by ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke). Such an affiliation has obviously influenced the paper that she not only supervised but also co-authored, particularly the concluding sentence: [i]“the high levels of exhaled CO found in this study indicate a possibly significant health hazard from use of waterpipes that requires further study"[/i][[b]7[/b]].[/size][/font]

[Kyashe]

Hey, the topic has always concerned me as well. However, I saw this little "test" some guy did with cigarettes which incorporated a device that is basically the same setup as a hookah. I dont know about you, but I've never seen my hookah water get THAT discolored, even after several sessions with the same water...Thoughts?

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXbYw3aZe3E"]http://www.youtube.c...h?v=aXbYw3aZe3E[/url]