Your vape isn’t just filled with a wild menagerie of toxic chemicals that are leading you straight into lead poisoning. A recent study has shown that it could also be warping the shape of baby mice’s skulls.
According to a new study from the Ohio State University College of Medicine, pregnant mice exposed to just the base ingredients of vape fluid, meaning no nicotine and no flavors, could be reshaping the skulls of their children. The little mouse pups that burst were born with smaller skulls and narrower faces.
The nicotine has nothing to do with it. The study’s lead author, anatomist James Cray, suspected it might have something to do with the base ingredients that nearly every vape liquid has in common: propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin (a.k.a. glycerol).
Breaking News: Vaping is Bad For You
To test this theory, his team created two basic vape juice mixes: the first was a 50/50 mix of glycol and glycerol. The other was a popular blend in the vape world, a 30/70 blend that is supposedly smoother on the throat and therefore “safer.”
The scientists then smoked out the mice with vape puffs for four hours a day, five days a week, throughout pregnancy. They expected the 50/50 mix to be more damaging, as the “common knowledge” of the vape world suggested that a 30/70 mix was the safer option.
However, instead, the 30/70 mix produced pups with shrunken faces and skulls, including notably shorter noses. Their body weight was also lower, although still within the normal range.
To be clear, these aren’t the kinds of deformities that would set a person down the road of becoming the baddie in a slasher movie. The changes were more statistically significant than physically. It’s also challenging to get a clear understanding of vaping’s effects on human babies for obvious ethical reasons; thus, the need to rely on mice as test subjects.
Mice are used instead of humans because there are many genetic similarities between humans. That said, that doesn’t mean that every reaction observed in mice can be mapped one-for-one onto a human.
At this rate, it’s probably safe to blanketly assume that vape juice of any type is probably bad for you in some way, a prospect made all the more dangerous considering how unregulated the entire sector is.
As with smoking traditional tobacco cigarettes, it’s probably best not to do it at all.
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