A new coffee shop opened up near where I live, and they serve more than lattes and peppermint tea. When you walk by, you can see tables outside with people puffing on hookahs. This whole hookah bar/parlor scene has found its way into American culture, and its popularity raises an important question. Is it safe?
When you smoke from a hookah, you inhale flavored tobacco from a hose that is attached to an ornate pipe, which is usually made out of glass or clay. There's water in the bottom, which filters the smoke leading people to believe hookahs are safer than smoking cigarettes, but they're terribly mistaken.
The problem is that hookah users tend to inhale far more smoke than cigarette smokers. More smoke means higher levels of nicotine, carbon monoxide, and other nasty chemicals. In a study published by the World Health Organization, they found that an average cigarette smoker took 8 to 12 puffs, and inhaled 0.5 to 0.6 liters of smoke over five to seven minutes. A hookah smoker may take anywhere from 20 to 200 puffs in one night, and each puff equals about one liter of smoke each. That means one hookah smoking session could equate to smoking 40 to 400 cigarettes. Yikes!
Here's the deal. Smoking flavored tobacco from a hookah is not any healthier than smoking regular cigarettes, and could actually be worse since you're inhaling more smoke, nicotine, and other chemicals. So don't get hooked on the hookah scene.
My-Wardrobe.com
Francesco Biasia
Koodos
so that's what they call it. oh my God! i wouldn't definitely try that. 40 to 400 cigarettes a night? no way!
1oh my God... and I used to love hookahing... but notice the verb tense,USED TO. I really did think it wasn't as bad as smoking cigarettes..
2You say hookah I say bong.
3I like hookah, because the flavored tobacco is yummy and it's pretty fun for a party. I'll only do it once a year or once in two years, though! It really is substance abuse, and paired with alcohol, you'll surely feel like hell the next day.
4Smoking of any kind turns me off. Gross!
5nasty! smoking of any kind is disgusting to me.
6Hahaha I have never tried smoking from a hookah...
7Hookah! haha.. i have tried it before.. and yea its taste's pretty good but thats about it!.. nothing to great for me! ... i liked it but not enough to smoke outta one of those things all the time! and i hate smoking.. so that = not enjoying this as well! lol
8You're not really supposed to inhale when smoking from a hookah, like with cigars. You take the smoke in your mouth for the aroma and fruit flavors...but shouldn't inhale. Of course you will naturally inhale some of it and it's definitely not healthy!
9hookah's gross. if you're used to smoking weed, don't smoke this....it'll make u light-headed.
don't smoke period, but whatever you prefer is cool. I'd pick weed ANY day.
10oh, and that picture of the 2 guys smoking out the hookah MAKES IT LOOK SOOOO BAD...geez! I've been to some fun hookah places and you dont just sit around, take a hit and stare at each other and say "uhhhhh"
expand your mind 2 inches to the right and left please. pick a better picture. and why does it have to be guys? I see more chicks than guys when I've gone to these places.
11I have one and we pull it out once in awhile, but the stuff we smoke says it is tobbacco and nicotine free. Does anyone know if there is a difference? Is the tobacco free herbal stuff still dangerous for you?
12gross
13Gross. I wonder how often they change the water on those bongs?
14My friends and I would smoke hookah in college with flavored tobacco, and although it's obviously not healthy you're really not supposed to inhale. I'm sure if you did it would be this bad but I've never met anyone who does!
15Ewwwwwwwwww
16i've done it a few times, and its not great, but its not terrible either. it's not addictive like cigarettes, the nicotine content is very low. When i've done it, I only took in a few puffs. It's a social activity, and it doesn't impair your judgement or anything. I think people only do it because it tastes good, and its a fun social gathering once in a while.
17Stuuuuuuuuuuupid.
18What is wrong with you people, I love my hookah! The shisha I use doesn't have as much nicotine/tobacco as a cigarette. Plus it doesn't taste like you're eating an ashtray. And, hookahs are all about it being a social thing, meaning you're probably not going to be smoking "40 cigarettes" unless you're going it alone.
19I've seen a few articles on how shisha is worse than cigarettes, but I grew up in the Middle East and I love my shisha and I will not give it up. It smells good, it tastes good, and it's fun to do with friends and family along with some coffee and Arabic sweets. You can smoke while watching a soccer game, watching the news, discussing politics, or just catching up. AND my friends and I inhale because we like the buzz...yes, it feels GOOD.
So there.
20bad w/o the nocotine.
21i love hookah and want to actually open up my own hookah bar one day.
i did a report on hookah smoking for a psych class during our discussion of addictions. shisha has only .3% tar per box of tobacco, which is roughly 4-6 bowls. one of the reasons cigarretes are so bad is that the distance from the burning tobacco to your lips and then your lungs is only a matter of a couple inches, so its extremely hot and not filtered very well. hookah smoke goes through 3-4ft of pipe, filtered through water, back up a foot of pipe, and then through a 4-6ft hose. By the time the smoke reaches your lungs its cool, and doesn't have the same effect. Add in the lack of inhale, and you're not burning the tobacco but actually baking it, and its not nearly as bad as cigarettes. it's not good for you, but there are def much worse things.
22But I like the hookah
. Seriously though, anyone who thinks smoking of any kind is at all
healthy is just stupid. I live a pretty healthy life otherwise, so going to the hookah bar a couple times a year is not going to kill me.
And yes, I inhale- that's when all the fun begins.
23VERY IMPORTANT PLEASE READ
ok now let me tell you people somthing that the so called doctors or whoever is doing the testing on this cig and hookah test aren't telling you so there trying to compare a hookah to a cigarette 1. a hookah doesn't have rat poison in it cigarettes do plus 3999 more chemicals that im not going to take the time to name so that equals 4000 chemicals
24This is an incredibly idiotic argument, honestly. The author's argument against hookah is not the ingrediants of hookah and cigarettes (in fact, the article fails to mention these at all), but that, if one smokes a lot of hookah, it equates to a cigarette. Well, duh. If you eat too many hamburgers it'll be as unhealthy as a cigarette too. But if you smoke hookah infrequently and don't inhale more than you should, then it will NOT equal 400 cigarettes.
25I have a hookah and it's not nasty like cigarettes, it's refreshing and very delicious. I have inhaled and regret it. I have lemon flavored shisha and could feel it in my lungs days after.
Oops! And if you're taking anywhere near 200 puffs from a hookah in one day (or a year)
then you're using it too much.
26That was not supposed to be a kiss emoticon. LOL.
27"More smoke means higher levels of nicotine, carbon monoxide, and other nasty chemicals"
This article doesn't state how much nicotine tobacco shisha contains compared to how much nicotine cigarette tobacco contains. Carbon monoxide may be the same, but the 'other nasty chemicals' need to be stated.
I would not recommend determining whether or not you should continue/start smoking hookah after reading this article... it does not provide enough details. Do your own research.
28Although, that study was done using a machine that straight pulled for 45 minutes. I'm making a video called "hookah size me" and so far in our studies we have not used a machine, only a hookah smoker vs a pack a day cigarette smoker.( they say a bowl of shisha is the equivalent to a pack) We have done lung capacity tests, and the hookah smoker outnumbered the cigarette smoker by 35%. Next test we did was a sprint and 1/2 mile test, and the hookah smoker ran the sprint faster by 8 seconds, and the 1/2 mile by a whole minute! One of our other tests was to pull smoke straight from a hookah and then through the water vase. The water filtered out 29% of tar. The final test was to weigh out nicotine between the two. Of one bowl of shisha, the user inhaled .22% nicotine, (notice the . in front of the 22) and the cigarette smoker inhaled a whopping 80% nicotine from his pack. Look for the video to be out soon.
29I like hookah, because the flavored tobacco is yummy and it's pretty fun for a party. I'll only do it once a year or once in two years, though! It really is substance abuse, and paired with alcohol, you'll surely feel like hell the next day.
30This is garbage. I've got well over 3000 grams of shisha The Layalina and Starbuzz flavors each have .05% (notice percent EX.1%=.01, so .05%=.0005 parts per 100) nicotine and 0% tar, no chemical additives. Lets consider the post about this being filtered through water and this alone, after doing the math would eqate about 10 bowls to ONE single cigarette.
Keep in mind that a tiny pill can kill you while a horsepill can act as a placebo, it is completely preposterous to think you can measure how much something will affect someone by "how much smoke there is" finally, and perhapps most trivially how exactly does one meausre smoke in liters a measurement for exclusively liquids...
31these statements are true on the amount of smoke you inhale. but also remember cigs have thousdands of toxic chemicals and loaded with nicotine while hookah smoke from shisha is natural no tar or chemicals and no nicotine and it is cooled in water which does not burn up your lungs or throat
32This is so biased hahaha ive been smoking hookah for idk 10 months or so... and when they said a puff is equal to 2 ciggs yet when i go my athletic doctor im improving in sports? doesnt make much sense there does it, as how i, 18 year old football, would be compared to a chain smoker in their words
most shisha contains 3 main ingredients and thats its molasses, fruit extracts, and yes there is tabacco in it but not other chemicals... take it for what its
worth but a last point is hookah started over in the middle east, still continued today by even children before and after meals and its a proven fact they live longer than americans
33Haha nice math i was reading the guys statements and the people who did it correctly should probabily have been writing the article....
34This article is actually completely FALSE!! there are no "other nasty chemicals" within the tobacco for a hookah. Here are the chemical listed on the cans of tobacco I have, "French Tobacco, Honey, Preservatives, Flavor, .05% Nicotine, 0% Tar." (throughout the entire can) That is all that the tobacco contains.. no "nasty chemicals." Yes there is Nicotine, but not a significant amount of nicotine is presented to the smoker to make it addicting. If there is a sort of addiction its a mental addiction from the smoker not a physical addiction from the tobacco. This article is a lie, biased, and is one of many articles that is used to scare people from doing something out of the norm. Since the author did some simple mathematics with how they came up with the amounts of smoke.. lets do the same... the net weight of this can is 8.8oz of tobacco. .05% nicotine in this can makes this can contain, .44oz of nicotine. 1oz = 28.4g... this can contains 12.496g of nicotine. 1 can of hookah tobacco has approx. 40-50 uses.. (worst case senerio) 12.496 divided by 40 = .324125 g of nicotine per use which is 324.125mg per use... since about 90% of nicotine gets burned off, that leaves 32.4125mg of nicotine per one use... since 1 hookah is typically shared between 3-4 people.. this make 1 person absorb 10.8mg of nicotine... The average Cigarette smoker gets 1mg of nicotine per cigarette, but an average cigarette smoker smokes about 1 pack a day making them absorb a minimum of 21mg of nicotine... so the amount of nicotine hookah gives off is no where near as addictive, nor destructive as cigarettes. Yes all smoking can cause health risks, but this is just to prove how much worse cigarettes are compared to hookah. On average, people who smoke hookah smoke 1-2 a week.. making them absorb 21.6mg of nicotine in 1 week.. an average cigarette smoker absorbs approximately 147mg of nicotine in a week, not including all the "other nasty chemicals" unlike hookah.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING ANOTHER INACCURATE OPINION ABOUT SMOKING HOOKAH.
35but how many cigarettes does a person smoke in one night??
36that not right because when i hookah i don't do 40 to 400 puffs but more like 7 to 10 so then need to be aware of the intake and not just test a surin amount because it is a group active i most case and your not just puffing you take turn and also when each of you have your know mouth piece you cant really get sick or anything like that
37So I've traveled around the world quiet a bit in the last 7 years, I've smoked, I've not smoked, I've lived in many different cultures than the average American.
I must say, I have just recently moved to Bahrain (this is my third time working/living in the Middle East) and there is a Sheesha bar down the street from my house. The Sheesha there is lovely, ESPECIALLY when compared to regular cigarettes!
I quit smoking in the beginning of 2007 when I moved to the UK. Don't get me wrong, quitting (cold turkey) with the move was great!
But I think that a lot of people are confusing "regular" tobacco used in the production of cigarettes with the actual tobacco used in genuine sheesha.
The main two things that people are overlooking: Additives, and cooking temperature.
Your average camel/lucky strike/newport/etc has a TON of chemical additives that the average person can't identify, much less pronounce.
Sheesha does not.
Temperature - I'm sure some enquiring minds will be able to find medical studies showing the different release rates of toxins released from tobacco based on cooking temperature.
A properly setup hookah only burns at 100-150 celsius, where as the studies showing how horrible hookah's are cooked their sheesha in excess of 600 celsius.
I'm not saying that sheesha and hookahs are good for you. They aren't, smoking ANYTHING is bad for you! I'm just trying to say that smoking some sheesha properly isn't nearly as bad as some fear mongers would like you to think...
38This is just about the most ridiculous thing I have ever read.
The level of fallacy here is at about a 10. Hasty generalization is now your middle name.
Nothing is said about the nicotine levels in the mix that goes into the pipe, or how much of it is tobacco vs other ingredients (hookahs are not pure tobacco but use other ingredients such as molasses), or how much better a filter is water than cotton. How much tar is in the mix that goes into the hookah vs the tar in a cigarette? Lets talk carcinogens instead of "how much smoke" which is entirely meaningless.
You really think if you smoked 40 cigarettes worth of nicotine in one night, and you were not used to it you wouldn't be sick? I assure you you would feel quite ill (research nicotine to see why if you don't know already).
This is about as bogus an article as the studies done by World Health Organization who are notoriously just plain dishonorable when it comes to issues of honesty and integrity.
Here's the deal, you need to get actual facts and adhere to a much higher level of research before grabbing some little tid-bits and using them to try and enforce your overall uneducated opinion.
Terrible.
39I think this is a goverment comspericy to make sure the cigerret companies dont lose money so people wont lose there jobs in this bad economy and that an american company wont fall be hind a forin company. i think this because a hookah is way healthier than a cigerret (its fact)
40although it may be the equivilant of 40+ cigarettes, keep in mind that one would normally only have a sitting once a day, or every other day. now the average smoker smokes a pack a day,, so in the end it sort of equals out?
41they say that you may inhale up to 200 liters of smoke yeah thats alot but what they didn't say is that the tobacco has many chemicals in it and about .5 nicotine in it and the hookah tobacco only has about four and .05 nicotine about 100% less. Also it doesnt smell like ass when the smoke come out
42While I am not going to contend that smoking hookah is not bad for you, it is not as bad as this article leads you to believe. If you look at the size of the bowl of tobacco and compare it to a pack of cigarettes, there is about the same amount of tobacco. So, IF you can smoke the entire bowl on your own (which will take several hours) you can equate that to about one pack of cigarettes worth of tobacco. Note the use of the word tobacco and not chemicals. As others have already pointed out, shisha contains none of the added chemicals and carcinogens that cigarette tobacco does.
Oh, and smoking Hookah produces no Carbon Monoxide (CO), the shisha doesn't burn hot enough to produce CO as a byproduct. Shisha burns at around 180 deg F while a cigarette burns at around 425 deg F. The energy required to generate CO is in excess of 250 deg F.
Another point regarding temperature, lets keep in mind that the smoke entering your lungs from a cigarette is far hotter than the smoke from a hookah. The cigarette is burning at 425F basically at your lips while the smoke from a hookah (180F) travels about 6-9 feet before hitting your lips and also is drawn through water (which cools it even more). Some people even use ice water to cool it further. I can't quote exact temperatures here because I haven't done any research in this regard, but let me ask you a question. What can you stand longer, an ice cube in your hand or holding your hand over a candle? Now which would do more damage the closer you got to it? Probably not the best of analogies, but it gets the idea across. Just something to ponder.
Those people who are of the opinion that hookah is not intended to be inhaled must be Bill Clinton fans (smile, its a joke), hookah smoke is to be inhaled to absorb the small amount (.05%) of nicotine contained in the shisha. You don't HAVE to, but to get the buzz you would need to inhale.
This is a poorly researched article and the author should be ashamed to have published it.
43"This article is actually completely FALSE!! there are no "other nasty chemicals" within the tobacco for a hookah. Here are the chemical listed on the cans of tobacco I have, "French Tobacco, Honey, Preservatives, Flavor, .05% Nicotine, 0% Tar." (throughout the entire can) That is all that the tobacco contains.. no "nasty chemicals." Yes there is Nicotine, but not a significant amount of nicotine is presented to the smoker to make it addicting. If there is a sort of addiction its a mental addiction from the smoker not a physical addiction from the tobacco. This article is a lie, biased, and is one of many articles that is used to scare people from doing something out of the norm. Since the author did some simple mathematics with how they came up with the amounts of smoke.. lets do the same... the net weight of this can is 8.8oz of tobacco. .05% nicotine in this can makes this can contain, .44oz of nicotine. 1oz = 28.4g... this can contains 12.496g of nicotine. 1 can of hookah tobacco has approx. 40-50 uses.. (worst case senerio) 12.496 divided by 40 = .324125 g of nicotine per use which is 324.125mg per use... since about 90% of nicotine gets burned off, that leaves 32.4125mg of nicotine per one use... since 1 hookah is typically shared between 3-4 people.. this make 1 person absorb 10.8mg of nicotine... The average Cigarette smoker gets 1mg of nicotine per cigarette, but an average cigarette smoker smokes about 1 pack a day making them absorb a minimum of 21mg of nicotine... so the amount of nicotine hookah gives off is no where near as addictive, nor destructive as cigarettes. Yes all smoking can cause health risks, but this is just to prove how much worse cigarettes are compared to hookah. On average, people who smoke hookah smoke 1-2 a week.. making them absorb 21.6mg of nicotine in 1 week.. an average cigarette smoker absorbs approximately 147mg of nicotine in a week, not including all the "other nasty chemicals" unlike hookah.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING ANOTHER INACCURATE OPINION ABOUT SMOKING HOOKAH."
44see now thats the truth but the shisha i smoke has a nicotine levle of 0.03% and no tar
smoking hookah is not as bad as smoking cigarette because you are only smoking more smoke per volume. so cigarette smoke is more dense than hookah smoke. also hookah filters out a lot of the nicotine from the water but you still get some of the nicotine. smoking hookah is safer than smoking cigarettes but it is still damaging to your lungs.
45in doing my random online browsing at work today, i stumbled across this article and laughed. Hi, my name is Fred, and i am a sales Rep for QuantumCig, an electronic cigarette company based primarily in Gwinnett county, Georgia. This study (and a few of the other comments for it) are, for lack of a better term, bullsh*t. sorry, but I've been actively involved in the smoking business for quite some time now, and I couldn't resist throwing out a few facts and numbers after reading this page. first, a little about myself. i have been actively smoking (starting with marijuana) since i was 11 years old, and I'm 20 now. for a total of about 4 1/2 years, i was smoking an average of ab out 2 1/2 packs a day, Camel Turkish and Domestic Blend, either 99's or Wides. i have smoked hookah since i was 17, and for about 1 1/2 years it was almost every night, upwards of 3-4 hours a night, as i lived very close to the Ohio State University campus, which has hookah at pretty much every 4th corner.
Now here are the facts:
first off, NO smoking is good for you. whether it be cigarettes, cigars, hookah, marijuana, crack, or even (yes, I'm saying it) electronic cigarettes. The simple fact is you are putting a foreign substance into your body that, by definition, doesn't belong there. Your body isn't built to smoke anything, period. However, some substances are obviously infinitely healthier to smoke than others. While yes, hookah tobacco does give the user considerably more smoke than a typical tobacco cigarette, it is still far healthier than a cigarette. A recent study was conducted by a team of professors, chairmen of major tobacco control organizations, and chemists, to defend electronic cigarette companies from the persecution by the FDA. the study showed amounts of certain carcinogenic chemicals in select tobacco and tobacco alternative products. the study revealed that while E cigs which had 8.183 amount of the chemicals (roughly the same as the nicotine patch, which is known not to cause cancer), Winston cigarettes had an average of 3365 amount of the same compound. This, however, was on the low end, compared to Newport with 3885, Malboro with 6600, and Camel, with an insane 7450. Unfortunately, hookah was not examined in their surveys, however it is a known fact that hookah, consisting of tobacco, has a good amount of carcinogenic chemicals naturally in it. This survey also, however, doesn't take into consideration the 4000+ chemicals that are additionally added to most brands of cigarettes. Cigarette companies dont add these chemicals, such as rat poison, cyanide, and arsenic, for no reason. they do 2 main things: make you more addicted to cigarettes in general by making your body more dependent on the nicotine naturally found in tobacco. And because each individual cigarette brand has a different blend of chemicals, they make you more addicted to that specific brand. Lets take a look at the smoking trends 50 years ago: cigarette advertisements were virtually everywhere, and smoking was widely accepted in most places. yet despite the extreme decline in the amount of smokers from then to now,the mortality rate directly related smoking has risen for both males and females more than 10%! What does that mean? Cigarettes are getting worse. much worse. So in reality, while smoking hookah is by no stretch of the imagination GOOD for you, it is nowhere near as bad as smoking cigarettes. For more proof of this, just visit India, where hookah has been part of the culture since the Mughal Empire, from the early 1500's. Also, and this is my last little point, consider who would be most against the use of hookah in particular. Most anti-smokers are against smoking period, even electronic cigarettes. They don't care what's BETTER for you, because they know its ALL BAD for you. Just a thought here, but the anti-hookah argument seems awfully familiar to the anti electronic cigarette argument... *GASP!* could it possibly be the SAME people who are spreading this crap? The FDA, widely known as one of the most corrupt government agencies in the world, are known to be backed by two major capital sources: Phillip Morris (also known as Malboro), and Pharmaceutical companies. So it stands reason that the more people use alternative products (such as electronic cigs or hookahs), the less people buy one of the worst cigarettes on the market, which ultimately lessens the number of people who purchase the horribly overpriced cancer medication from (you guessed it) the pharmaceutical companies. Maybe it's just me, but I'm beginning to sense a pattern here... let me know what you think people.
-Fred, Quantumcig @ Mall of Georgia
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