The harmfulness of hookah. How is it really?

We are in modern times where the trend is a healthy lifestyle. This is basically a good development and we can only be grateful for such an approach by the company.

Of course, many media and influencers are also adapting to this trend, and on its wave they fight for anything that may seem even a little bit unhealthy to this modern society.

One of the current trends is the fight with hookahs. This is slowly becoming a modern-day witch hunt - in the full sense of this connection.

How is it meant? He is the crowd pillaging everything that is connected with smoking and always finds his own arguments, without being willing to discuss anything openly. To write somewhere that smoking water pipes is in principle different from smoking cigarettes is now practically equivalent to public suicide.

The trend speaks clearly – smoking is bad and it applies to all types of smoking! And really, there's nothing to be surprised about. In the case of cigarettes, the fight against this industry took a really long time and he had to rely on a lot of studies, and especially real evidence, before he started to convince the masses in the new generation.

After a strenuous battle with windmills, the company managed the impossible and public perception turned against smokers. As part of the partial successes, it was only a matter of time before the practically fanatical society reached hookahs as the next goal of its struggle.

And hookah comes at the height of the fight against the smoking industry, and so with blindfolds one article after another is now published to defame the industry. Who would dare to go against the trend these days and really try to think about the whole topic from start to finish?

This really amounts to the aforementioned social suicide...

So I decided to commit social suicide and go against the windmills. Because I stand behind the fact that hookah is not as harmful as it is claimed.

Why do I think that? The current trend is that key studies and articles use quotations taken out of context, references to unrelated data and, in the best cases, rather point to the misuse of hookah and its effects. These inaccuracies set off an unstoppable avalanche of articles condemning hookah use.

It could be said that this whole hunt for hookahs started with a study by the US American University of Beirut, where, using the developed standardized robotic smoking, they made basic measurements [1]. Let's break it down simply.

The approach to the measurement itself is a relatively good basis for initial orientation. The problem with hookah, however, is the different approach in its preparation, handling, use of individual products and, last but not least, in smoking itself.

For a cigarette, the measurement is thus relatively stable and the simulated puff (for the measurement machine set to 35ml of smoke once per minute for approx. 6 minutes) corresponds approximately to reality.

The setting of the parameters for hookah smoking does not reflect reality so much anymore - 530ml puff of smoke (approx. 3s) every 17s for 60 minutes. This may not seem like an exaggeration, but it is not even close to it the normal behavior of a pipe smoker when smoking a hookah and we will gradually explain why.

The frequency itself does not really reflect reality. Imagine that you are sitting in a tea room with a pipe and discussing some interesting topic with someone. As part of smoking, you change your pipe, sometimes you need a drink, jump somewhere or engage in a discussion. As part of the entire ritual, you will usually have to exchange carbons several times. And these are only some of the factors.

The next thing is the equipment itself. It is relatively easy to do an example test with a cigarette. A cigarette is simply a cigarette and you only test individual brands. The simulation is quite simple.

However, many other factors affect the result of hookah. From the tobacco used, the method of filling it, the chosen crown to the heat management used (HMS, foil...) or coal.

For our discussed case, unnatural coal was used, which lay on the crown with aluminum foil in direct contact with tobacco throughout the test.

The test result itself mainly focuses on the volume of smoke taken in, and it is logically higher (according to the source study used, multiples such as 100-500x higher volume of inhaled smoke from a hookah than from a cigarette are used in the headlines).

In principle, this statement is not (with regard to the input parameters, which we have already refuted) completely deceptive and cannot be contradicted. The problem is that most of the media take this number out of context and automatically evaluate that a person smoking a hookah logically absorbs 100-500 times higher content of harmful substances. But what about the smoke?

The most important factor, which is generally overlooked, is the content of the smoke itself, mainly the abundantly inflected tar contained in it. Many tests have proven that cigarette smoke is harmful, and scientists have gradually analyzed up to about 4,700 chemicals that [1]< /em>.