I am always looking for simple and easy ways of explaining the positive aspects of vaping compared to cigarette smoking. Here's a quotation from one of
Carl Phillips' older blog posts on why, with just a basic understanding of science, we really don't need any complex studies to tell us that e-cigarette vapor is vastly different from cigarette smoke.
"[h]ow do we know that e-cigarette vapor is not similar to cigarette smoke? The same way that we know that it is not similar to monkey urine - with our scientific reasoning process that says, "Why would we ever even expect it to be similar?" Cigarette smoke is produced by burning complex plant matter which produces a lot of the many known products of combustion and a little bit of more chemicals than we could ever count. E-cigarette vapor is produced by heating a liquid of (mostly) known chemistry, very much not like plant matter, into a vapor phase with little change in the chemistry other than its physical state. The best evidence that we have that they are different is right there in that reasoning."
Normally I just mention the lack of combustion with e-cigarettes and leave it at that. But now I think it's worth going a little further and explaining how combustion causes a plethora of radical chemical changes when complex plant matter is burned, while vaping primarily converts a liquid of simple chemistry into a gas with few chemical changes. That is, unless you work in a PSU science lab and manage to get an e-cigarette to do what it was never designed to do: subject the e-cigarette to temperatures high enough to cause combustion.
