Thanks M & M, it is good to have all those links regarding our base liquids.
Something interesting I came across today: RJReynolds has a list of all ingredients used in their cigarettes at
Cigarette Ingredients | Tobacco Ingredients. The maximum content percentage is noted for each ingredient.
For glycerol (i.e. VG) they show 11.14% as the maximum, and for PG 2.116%
Although RJReynolds doesn't list exact percentages of ingredients per brand of cigarette, I looked up Camel Filters Soft Pack on their site and its ingredients in descending order of quantity are:
tobacco, water, glycerol, brown sugar, propylene glycol, ...
Very interesting, glycerol right up there, and PG also in the top five.
I think that cigarettes generally weigh roughly 1 gram. So for some brand of cigarette (whichever one contains 11% glycerol) there's 0.11 * 1 * 20 = 2.2 grams of glycerol in a pack of the cigarettes. That's the same as 2.2 ml of VG, which is a reasonably typical amount of
juice per day for a vaper.
It is also interesting to note that there's one known concern with VG. At 280 degrees C it breaks down into acrolein. Acrolein is an irritant. It is present in cigarette smoke (no surprise since many cigarettes contain VG, and cigarettes reach temperatures over 700C at the burn center, dropping under 300C only at 2mm behind the burn) and has recently been shown to be carcinogenic (see
Acrolein is a major cigarette-related lung cancer agent: Preferential binding at p53 mutational hotspots and inhibition of DNA repair ? PNAS.)
Anyway, the bottom line here is that some cigarettes may contain as much VG as a vaper might use, and the risks from acrolein are probably much lower with e-cigarettes than from smoking because e-cigarettes run at a much lower temperature. If a user wants to reduce the risk of acrolein to nearly zero it might be advisable to avoid use of high voltage
mods (higher temperatures) with VG based liquids.
