Raise your hand if you have smoked hookah. Don’t be ashamed — you’re in college, and hookah isn’t bad for you, is it? Hookah doesn’t have harmful chemicals, it doesn’t cause cancer and it isn’t addictive, right?
Wrong. Recently there has been an overwhelming amount of evidence from scientific experiments showing that hookah smoking is harmful.
For those of you living under a rock, hookah, also known as water-pipe smoking, is a form of smoking that requires, you guessed it, a water pipe. Tobacco leaves, usually flavored, are heated at the top. From there, the smoke moves down through a pipe into a pool of water at the bottom and bubbles out of the water to be inhaled. Hookah smoking originated in the Middle East and spread to Europe and Asia and recently to North America. This form of smoking has been around for hundreds of years but has picked up enormous popularity in the past decade. People enjoy the smoothness and taste of the smoke and the social quality of water-pipe smoking.
There are many popular misconceptions about smoking hookah. For instance, there is the idea that the water filters out all the toxins in the smoke. The water does nothing to filter out the toxins, which means that with each drag, smokers are breathing in a great deal of toxins including tar and heavy metals from the charcoal that are usually used to heat the tobacco. When people smoke hookah, they are breathing in carcinogens, or cancer-causing agents. And because average hookah smokers will smoke for around 45 minutes to an hour, they are breathing in as many or more dangerous chemicals than they might if they were to smoke multiple cigarettes.
Tobacco naturally produces nicotine. Nicotine can cause the release of endorphins and dopamine, as well as acetylcholine, which makes us feel more focused and energized. It also causes users to be hypoglycemic, which means glucose is released into the blood, stopping them from feeling hungry; additionally, it can increase the cholesterol levels in the arteries and veins, putting users at a higher risk of heart attack and stroke.
When we breathe, gas exchange occurs between the air and our bodies. We inhale air into our lungs; important chemicals like oxygen will cross through a thin layer of cells in our lung and enter the bloodstream, and carbon dioxide will exit the bloodstream to be exhaled. But when people smoke, carcinogens come in contact with those cells and damage them, and if there is enough damage, the cells will start to grow irregularly and become cancerous. It is hypothesized that particles and chemicals from smoke cross the line of cells and enter the bloodstream, where they cause cancer.
In essence, smoking poisons your entire body, so it is important to realize that hookah smoking is not harmless.
So, fellow college students, please forgo this admittedly delicious-smelling trend, and stay away from the hookah pipe, for your own sake.
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