For many years, the use of tobacco products has been a serious public health issue. While cigarettes have dominated this conversation, hookah use has grown in popularity recently, particularly among young individuals. A device used to smoke flavored tobacco is a hookah, commonly referred to as a shisha or waterpipe. Is it, however, worse than smoking? In this piece, we’ll examine the negative effects of hookah smoking and contrast them with those of cigarette smoking.
Let’s now examine the negative effects of hookah smoking. The idea that hookah is less dangerous than cigarettes is one of the most common misconceptions about it. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Smoking a hookah requires inhaling smoke from charcoal that has been burned, which heats up flavoring tobacco and produces dangerous compounds. In actuality, smoking a hookah exposes people to more smoke and harmful chemicals than smoking a cigarette. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a normal hookah session can be equivalent to smoking 100 or more cigarettes in a single hour.
It’s a common misperception that the water in a hookah bowl is filtered to remove dangerous toxins. However, studies have shown that not all dangerous pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, heavy metals, and cancer-causing substances like benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), are completely removed by water filtering.
Contrarily, smoking is linked to a number of health issues, such as lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, and respiratory conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Over 70 cancer-causing compounds have been found in cigarette smoke, according to research.
In conclusion, although smoking cigarettes and hookah are both bad for your health, hookah smoking isn’t much worse. Due to the substantial amounts of smoke and hazardous chemicals created as well as the possibility of contracting infectious diseases, it may even be more damaging in some ways. Therefore, it’s critical to spread the word about the negative effects of hookah use and to motivate people to stop using it altogether.