When you dry out any part of your body it will pull moisture from other parts so yes it can lead to dehydration. You may not consider it a risk, but that goes to tell me you have never been hospitalized over dehydration, which is great for you, but it is a real health risk if let go.
As far as testing if water plays a part in vaping, wait til your mouth is almost dry, take a hit off your pv. Note the vapor you exhale. Take a drink of water and take a second hit. You will see a major difference.
I agree that yes it will dehydrate you. However loosing say, 5mg of water/hr, vs sweating out 4 ounces of water/hr is a much different thing. No offense, if someone vaped till they needed medical attention for dehydration, they should be hospitalized for other reasons
And yes, I agree that pre-moistening your mouth prior to vaping will increase the amount of vapor; however, I see that as a very saturday morning Dr. Science home experiment, that should not be any basis for a warning about dehydrating, or basis for saying that most of the vapor you see is from the fluids in your body, and not the surrounding air.
What I am saying is that the amount of water you loose from your body through vaping is hardly worth the gratuitous and emphatic warnings of the dangers of dehydration that I see in many posts.
I'm glad you spoke up, since in my three years here I have never heard anyone dispute this.
But you seem to know what you're talking about, and you do make sense.
I am aware of a number of vaping myths, and they bother me as well.
I try to point them out when I can, and would certainly hate to perpetuate any.
So is vaping dehydrating or not?
Maybe this is question that should be looked at a little more closely.
And without people like you speaking up, it won't be.
Yeah, I don't like perpetuating myths either. As far as vaping being dehydrating, everything I've read is "YES", technically, it is. However, the health risks of the dehydrating effects (classic dehydration health risks) of vaping is, imho much less than the health risks of having a dry mouth. My dentist (and I've had more dentists than I care to recall), whom I trust, explained to me that smoking will dry your mouth, which provides a better environment for bad bacteria to grow, hence more gum disease and cavities. (I have bad TMJ for the record). This is a much more justifiable reason to say 'drink more water' than to claim you will suffer from accute dehydration, especially when I figure 99% of people probably suffer from some stage of dehydration in thier normal lives.
I've had the opportunity to speak with many doctors from many different feilds of real medicine. I mean surgeons, not research scientists and nutritionalists and psychiatrists and the like. Just because someone with letters after thier name says something, it does not mean
it is the right thing to do. I could post 3pages worth of examples for this, but I'll try and keep it shorter.
To keep this more OT, and to the OP:
No we are not ingesting water, we are loosing water in very small amounts. To expand on that, drinking water to avoid the drymouth and subsiquent complications that can arise from that, is a good idea. And nicotine inhibits diuresis, it is not like caffine which is commonly held or shown to be a diuretic. Right now I'm not going to look up the actual effects of caffine.
To address any myths or overreactive statements, drinking more water to offset the inhibition of diuresis isn't a bad idea, I agree.
Is it the ominous health risk that some posts seem to say it is? No. When you get thirsty, you get a drink of water. When a pregnant woman craves odd food, it's because her body is saying it wants more vitaminX. Your body will try and self regulate, listen to it.
Common myth: Nicotine in vaping is absorbed predominantly through the mouth/nasal mucus membranes, for whatever reason, over the membranes of the lungs.
So far, in all the searching I've been able to dig up, there has been no legitimate study of this, so anything on the matter is pure
conjecture. Molecular size? This is more intelligent conjecture, but conjecture none the less.
Common myth: While vaping, you only absorb a fraction of nictotine than you would from smoking, this is why many people chain vape in the morning or evening before bed.
Again, there has been no medical study of the amount of nicotine absorbed by vaping. The closest information I have found is the New Zeland study of 2008 :
http://www.healthnz.co.nz/RuyanCartridgeReport30-Oct-08.pdf
Quoting page 21: "
Inhaled nicotine in cigarettes is over 98% absorbed(6), and so the exhaled mist of the e-cigarette is composed of prolylene glycol, and probably contains almost no nicotine and no CO."
Key here is
probably contains almost no nicotine. The no CO is shown on the table on page 19 at 1.5parts per million.
The root of this myth is, I believe, because nicotine in cigs gets to the brain in something like 10-20seconds, sorry I don't have the link to the study I read supporting that, and the nicotine in vaping, lacking the supporting chemicals contained in cigarettes, takes longer to reach the brain. It's easy to see that
nicotine in vaping does not provide the same instant gratification that nicotine in cigs does, leading to more vaping as you subcionciously search for that satisfaction.
As an aside, now you can put two and two together and see why after sex, people enjoy cigarettes, because cigs also contain MAO inhibitors, slowing the purging of dopamine, thereby prolonging the 'feel good' of what you just did. Vaping does not contain the MAOi's, so you won't get that 'feeling' vaping after having sex. (study pg8 on MAOi's)
Common myth (or overreaction):
I just started vaping and now I feel sick. Overreaction - You're allergic to pg, so see a doctor and get some 100% vg juice.
With the 4000+ known and unknown chemicals in a cigarette, I would say that if you had no allergic reaction to vaping your juice within 5-10 minutes or less, that any irritation, body aches and pains, are due to withdrawl. It's commonly held, and observed, that people will go through phsyical and mental withdrawl when switching to vaping. Be patient and deal with it. If you feel the need, see your doctor. But how many poeple will come back and post that they paid 250$ for the doctor to tell them they're suffering withdrawl symptoms, get rest, and tough it out? I havn't seen any post like that, compared to plenty of "it sucked the first few weeks but now I feel great".
Some absurdities and flogging common sense:
The batteries can explode and devistate your mouth, home, dog, neighborhood....
The same thing was said when the luggable was replaced by the laptop. Plenty of instances of fires etc, from failed batteries. Is it so much to warrant all the red flag warnings surrounding batteries, to the extent of charging them outside? How many of the poeple that give these warnings plug in thier cell phone and walk away, or are reading this with thier laptop, battery inside, plugged into the power outlet.
If you use your 18650 as a hammer, you shouldn't be surprised at a resulting catastrophic failure. Even if you do nothing wrong, things fail. In general, I would think it's safe to say your cellphone and laptop have the same risks as your pv for ruining your whole day.
In todays mass media world of instant experts that love to self aggrandize on blogs and in the mainstream media, it seems almost vouge to banter over minutia.
A tablet of common sense, three times daily, goes a long way. Even if it is on the FDA's list of non approved substances.