The fact that vaping is more popular than smoking in the UK should be a cause for celebration. While better education, public smoking bans, and huge excise taxes cut away at the low-hanging fruit, vapes are what supercharged the UK’s falling smoking prevalence. However, a new article in the Telegraph, titled Five ways vaping is wrecking your health, thinks we need to focus on make vaping “uncool”.
Drawing mostly from discussion with Lion Shahab, who is the professor of health psychology at UCL and co-director of the UCL Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group, it’s a mixed bag. Some parts have merit, such as rightly dismissing the “popcorn lung” conspiracy and even mentioning that vapes are less dangerous than cigarettes. Other parts draw on disputed or misleading studies with a few inaccurate conclusions that the authors never intended.
So, let’s take a look.
#1. Lung damage
First off, just because vapes are safer than cigarettes, it doesn’t mean they’re as safe as breathing in fresh sea air. So, some of these sections are fine, but there are some issues.
The study in question, E-cigarette Use and Incident Cardiometabolic Conditions in the All of Us Research Program, does not show this. If you read the study, it’s not a measure of people who solely vaped for five years. Instead, it followed health records for a median of around 3.7–3.9 years.
More importantly, it reported an association between current exclusive e-cigarette use at the time of COPD diagnosis, which naturally includes people who smoked for years and switched to vapes before subsequently getting a diagnosis. You can’t draw solid conclusions about vaping from these populations.
The next study, Even nicotine-free vapes can harm the lung, is also misleading. Again, this was not a study of people who actually vape. Instead, researchers took one brand and flavour of a particular nicotine-free vape liquid and put it directly onto human cells grown in a laboratory. While this did show a potentially harmful effect, it’s important to note that liquid is not an aerosol and cell stress is not the same as the clinical lung damage one might find in COPD.
So, while I think we should certainly take both studies seriously and dig deeper, the Telegraph author overeggs it by misunderstanding what the papers are comfortable stating.
2. Higher heart rate and blood pressure
This section gets the basics about raised heart rates and blood pressure from nicotine over the short term. However, it substantially overstates what the cited research proves, in particular the claims that vapes cause heart attacks because, again, the studies they cite don’t distinguish between never-smokers and current vapers.
Additionally, the implication that the AHA study demonstrates vascular damage caused by vaping is outrageous. The paper shows a difference in test results between vapers and non-vapers, indicating that regular vapers’ arteries widened less on one ultrasound. It’s a leap to suggest that’s evidence of permanent damage or causation.
3. Mouth and lung cancer
There is a lot of sloppiness here. Firstly:
The study showed that 56% were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer, not die from it. It’s an important distinction. Secondly, and you might be noting a pattern here, the 2026 South Korean study compared two groups of former smokers, not vapers with never-users.
As for the carcinogenic ingredients claims, there are some important caveats. The presence of these substances is not enough to suggest the levels are hazardous enough to cause cancer. What’s more, many studies have involved completely unrealistic device use, which essentially burns the coils in totally improbable ways, meaning they don’t tell us enough about real-world vaping conditions.
4. Depression and suicide
The article starts getting a bit desperate by this stage, and you get the feeling that it might have been better kept for three reasons, even though they had their own problems.
The inference that vaping or nicotine causes depression and suicide attempts is not supported by the two cited papers. This pernicious claim has been dismantled time and time again as, at best, an association, i.e., people with mental health issues are more likely to use nicotine. We should also note that the Bristol paper cited above is about cigarettes and not vapes.
Additionally, the Bristol paper authors’ actual conclusion was that nicotine’s role “cannot be entirely dismissed,” but that the causal effect of smoking on depression appears to be largely independent of nicotine exposure and more to do with genetic liability. In other words, you can’t cite a study finding that smoking’s effect on depression is mainly not explained by nicotine, then use it to claim that vaping demonstrates nicotine causes poor mental health.
5. Meningitis and glandular fever
The Telegraph saves the worst for last. If you thought #4 was thin, you’re in for a surprise.
Prof Shahab is quoted as saying, “there is a potential risk from sharing devices,” when talking about a recent outbreak of meningitis that spread through Kent earlier this year. While this is true, it’s hardly an example of how vaping itself is wrecking anyone’s health. It’s just as absurd as saying that kissing is destructive to your well-being or whatever. Sure, raising some awareness about the potential risk of sharing vapes, straws, cutlery, etc., is a good idea, but let’s not pretend that this is about e-cigarette harm.
Final thoughts
The author misunderstands, misquotes, and misapplies almost all of the research they present. On its face, this seems like a credible and well-researched article. However, a little digging shows just how facile and alarmist the conclusions are. Most readers won’t have time to dig in here, and will come away with the impression that lung cancers, heart attacks, and cancer are what await vapers. These claims are not supported by a fair analysis of the research.
