In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we discuss the differences between e-cigarettes (vapes) and far-less-studied dry herb vaporizers. Then we talk about some of the incredible evolutionary adaptations of populations of people living at high altitudes.
Transcript of this Episode
Deboki Chakravarti: Welcome to Tiny Show and Tell Us, the bonus series where you write in with your favorite science news or factoid, and we read your email aloud and then dive deeper. I'm Deboki Chakravarti and I'm here with my co-host Sam Jones.
Sam Jones: Hey, Deboki, psyched to do this episode today. Two weeks ago was super fun where we talked about, well, I guess the coral bleaching and sewage part was not super fun, but-
Deboki Chakravarti: Well, we talked about poop.
Sam Jones: Yeah, we did talk about poop, a highlight. We talked about hornet nests and could you crochet a hornet nest? Generally speaking, no. But go check that out, episode 19, if you haven't. But we have a couple more cool things for you to hear about today. So before I kick things off officially, a big thank you to Tien Nguyen for doing the research for this episode. A reminder that we are always looking for you to write to us to be featured in one of the episodes. So email tinymatters@acs.org or fill out the form that's linked in the episode description. All right, I'm going to go first this time.
Deboki Chakravarti: Cool.
Sam Jones: So my Tiny Show and Tell Us is from listener Santiago. Santiago wrote in saying, "Hi. I listened to the vaping versus smoking episode and I found it really interesting. For a long time, I intuitively thought that both were bad, with smoking being worse, but lacked the knowledge and information to know that for sure. So thank you so much for exploring the subject." You're welcome.
And then, Santiago writes, "However, I was also hoping to understand how vaping e-cigarettes compare to using a dry herb vaporizer." So for those of you who haven't listened to the episode, go back and listen. If you really want to understand the difference between smoking cigarettes versus vaping, which is worse, I will tell you right now, smoking is a lot worse, but it doesn't mean that vaping is safe, but we really get into the science of it, and I think it's one of those topics that's just been blown up in a sometimes good, but you can get a lot of misinformation baked in. And so, we really break it down for you if you want to understand that better.
So let's start with what an e-cigarette or vape is. According to the CDC, e-cigarettes, they're battery-operated devices and they will heat a liquid to produce an aerosol. And you can find these in a bunch of different shapes and sizes. A lot of times, they will contain nicotine. Really, I think that stems from the fact that a lot of people are trying to turn to vapes instead of smoking cigarettes. And so, oftentimes you do have nicotine, not always, but oftentimes.
Deboki Chakravarti: Got it.
Sam Jones: So then, in comparison, a dry herb vaporizer, which I will say has way less information about it that's available.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, I don't think I've even, I mean, I know so little about smoking to begin with, but I'd never heard of a dry herb vaporizer.
Sam Jones: Yeah, totally. I had heard of them, but you don't see them as much and you don't hear about them as much for sure. I think people are just so, like vapes are the thing. And then I think sometimes, maybe when people are talking about a dry herb vaporizer, people think like, "Oh, do you just mean a vape?" But it's different. So we're distinguishing the two. So I think I'm just going to refer to it either as a e-cigarette, which means vape or dry herb vaporizer, and that's how I'm going to distinguish them in this episode so we're not so confused by the word vaporizer being used a billion times.
So a dry herb vaporizer, the way it works is you have hot air that comes into the device and it passes over whatever you have ground up in there. And it's a plant material of sorts. So sometimes it's tobacco, sometimes it's cannabis. I think when people talk about these, they're often talking about cannabis, but not always. And then, that just creates an aerosol. Like with an e-cigarette, you inhale it. There are differences between these two, of course. There's a lot more data on vapes than there are on these dry herb vaporizers. So there's a lot more information about vapes.
But according to ourfutures.org, which is an article that we'll also link to in the transcript, so with these dry herb vaporizers, like I said, you're heating plant material, but you're heating it to its vaporization point, which is 350 degrees Celsius. It's not combusting. Combustion is what you get with a plain old cigarette, and that's around 400 to 900 degrees Celsius. And then, that is what you're breathing in. So these, I guess, are sometimes referred to as heat-not-burn or HNB products because you're not burning anything. If you're burning it, you're combusting it.
When you look at these dry herb vaporizers and you compare them to e-cigarettes, you're looking at really different active ingredients. So like I said, with e-cigarettes, often you have nicotine in there. And then, I mean, I think most people know this, if you have ever vaped or you are around someone who vapes, there's always these flavors, like you can smell different flavorings. So there's always these chemical flavorings. They're in a liquid, that liquid is heated and vaporized and yeah, so that's the comparison. So you have, with the dry herb vaporizers, this is redundant to say, but you're heating dry herb, and then with e-cigarettes you're heating up a liquid and in neither case are you combusting anything. It's not getting hot enough. So again, in both cases you're getting vaporization. So you are inhaling vapor.
Again, there's less data that comes from dry herb vaporizers. There is research that would definitely indicate that vaping cannabis is better than smoking it, which really just means are you getting the vapor or are you combusting it? That's not shocking just based on what we know about cigarettes versus e-cigarettes. And so, when you combust something, you're creating all these additional chemical reactions where you have all of these chemicals and a lot that have incomplete combustion. It's like a whole different landscape. And so, the idea is if you're just getting to the point where it's vapor, you're reducing your exposure to toxins.
Tien found a study from 2023 that looked at emissions from dry chamomile in an herb vaporizer, which I thought was really interesting. But again, people have studied this, but not really. And there are a bunch of links that we can share absolutely, so that you can explore yourself. But I found that it was very hard to find links to any research that was really that compelling.听
Generally speaking, what we definitely know is that vapes are better for you than cigarettes, traditional cigarettes, where you have combustion. If the standard e-cigarette is worse for you than a dry herb vaporizer, it's not clear. A lot of people would say so. But again, the research is very limited, and I think that more work has been done with vapes at this point. Again, doesn't mean they're safer, but people have just been more interested in vapes because of their comparison to smoking full-on cigarettes.
Deboki Chakravarti: For sure. Interesting. Well, Sam, I am here with something from listener Melinda who says, "It would be very interesting to learn about populations which adapted to high elevation life through evolutionary changes." Yeah, I agree.
Sam Jones: Okay, yeah. I'm interested too.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. I think one of the things that's really, really interesting about this, about the research for this is that, first off, I am not cut out for high altitude life. Keep me firmly at this elevation. I'm good.
Sam Jones: Are you a person who gets sick really easily when you go to higher altitudes?
Deboki Chakravarti: Not that I noticed, but I like things easy. I think I err on the side of taking it super, super easy. I remember when we were in Colorado for the conference for, was it National Association of Science Writers?
Sam Jones: Yeah.
Deboki Chakravarti: And I was like, cool, I'm doing a 10-minute run, that is as hard as I'm going, and I am not going any harder. I don't have it in me to risk anything being debilitated by overconfidence. But obviously, higher elevation, you're dealing with thinner air. And our bodies, they rely on oxygen. This can be a problem. And so, one of the things that was really cool about going into some of the research Tien did for this is that I learned that different populations do this differently. A lot of times when people talk about people living at high elevations, a lot of what we know comes from people who live in the Andes. And there are a few different adaptations that we've come to learn exist in these populations and anthropologists and physiologists, they have all wanted to understand how does this work. And they've been looking for genetic adaptations to higher altitudes at least since the early '90s.
And so, there have been different studies going on to look at multiple gene regions for people who live in the Andes and to see is there something. There are some genes that people have found. They might do things like regulate vascular control. We've also found people in this area, they have lungs that have a somewhat larger volume so that they can take in more air. They also, interestingly, have more uterine artery blood flow during pregnancy, which is really cool. It makes a lot of sense. There is a lot of blood flowing during pregnancy. I just thought it was really interesting that they could find this out specifically and see it happening. We also know that Andeans?
Sam Jones: I think it's Andeans.
Deboki Chakravarti: People who live in the Andes, they've also adapted to thinner air, even though they breathe at the same rate as people who live at lower altitudes, which is interesting. That could be a potential adaptation. And we'll talk about that actually in a little bit. But one way you adapt to having thinner air is just that you breathe a lot faster or breathe more so that you can get more air in, but they're able to breathe at the same rate as you and me because their red blood cells are actually able to carry more oxygen and deliver oxygen around the body better. And one of the ways they do this is by having a higher concentration of hemoglobin in the blood. So that is one way of dealing with this challenge. Then, there are Tibetans, and they actually will usually breathe more breaths every minute than people at sea level. So they usually go for this higher breathing rate method.
Sam Jones: That is just so interesting that there are, I mean, I think about that just in nature where you'll see different adaptations to the same environment. Like there are different ways of dealing with it. And it's so cool that that happens in people too.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, it's so neat. Another thing that we've seen with Tibetan people is that their blood vessels can expand to deliver oxygen more efficiently around their body. Apparently, one thing that their bodies do, their lungs make a lot of nitric oxide gas, which increases the diameter of blood vessels. So that might be the way that they're increasing blood flow around their body.
Sam Jones: That's so cool.
Deboki Chakravarti: I just thought that's a really interesting mechanism. And then, another population of people who are living at high altitudes are Ethiopian highlanders. They don't do either of those things. And so, people have been really wondering, like they don't do faster breathing rate, they don't do like this hemoglobin. People have been wondering how are they able to survive such high altitudes. So this is still something people are working to understand. But researchers did find a mutation in a gene for a protein called endothelin receptor type B or ERTB. And in mice, they found that when those mice who have this mutation are experiencing severe hypoxia, they're still able to get oxygen to their organs. So we don't necessarily know, again, still the overall mechanism that's helping Ethiopian highlanders live where they live, but there is like some clue there in this gene.
One other thing that I thought was really interesting is that there are pros and cons to living this high altitude life. Obviously, you're dealing with thinner air. There is more death from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and there might also be more infections in the lower respiratory tract, but there's lower mortality from cardiovascular disease and strokes and certain cancers.
Sam Jones: Wow, that's so interesting. So it's like there might be more intense impacts on your lungs, but your heart is probably more efficient, potentially.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah.
Sam Jones: Huh. That is so fascinating.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. If you're a Tiny Matters listener and you live in a high altitude place, tell us your adaptations.
Sam Jones: Yeah. Tell us about it. I'm like just a boring sea level person.
Deboki Chakravarti: Well, thank you to Santiago and Melinda for writing into Tiny Show and Tell Us, a bonus episode from Tiny Matters created by the American Chemical 中国365bet中文官网 and produced by Multitude. And a big thank you again to Tien Nguyen for doing the research for this episode.
Sam Jones: Send us an email to be featured in a future Tiny Show and Tell Us episode at tinymatters@acs.org. Or you can fill out the form that's linked in this episode's description. We'll see you next time.
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