As more facts are discovered about vaping and how it affects the human body, new research has emerged showing that using e-cigarettes is highly beneficial to the gut microbiome — microorganisms that live in the intestines and are essential for living a healthy life. As long as these tiny creatures are themselves healthy, that is.
It turns out that the average healthy person can have as much as 2kg of microbes in their gut. These comprise many trillions of microorganisms, including over 1,000 kinds of bacteria, and each microbiome is as unique as the person who is carrying it. Why do we need this forest of microbes in our intestines? It's a symbiotic relationship: we can't always digest everything we eat and that's where our gut microbiome comes in. It helps to break down foods and is also believed to assist with the production of vitamins B, K and others that play a key part in keeping our immune system healthy.
Therefore, harming your gut microbiome with a poor diet or toxic substances has the potential to lead to the body getting fewer nutrients from its food than it needs. It can also mean the body lacks essential vitamins and minerals — an affected person can soon feel run down,and even become ill, as their immune system is not what it once was. In fact, so important are these microbes to human health that they are now considered an organ in their own right. Notably, the organisation Gut Microbiota for Health states “it is an ‘acquired' organ, as babies are born sterile; that is, intestine colonisation starts right after birth and evolves as we grow.
Gut Microbiome: Gone Up in Smoke
Smoking cigarettes, not surprisingly, is highly detrimental to the many organisms living in the intestines and helping to keep a person healthy. “Intestinal microbiome is susceptible to the influence of environmental factors such as smoking, and recent studies have indicated microbiome alterations in smokers,” says recent research.
We now know that burning tobacco produces thousands of chemicals that should not be anywhere near the human body, many of which are carcinogenic. When you consider that cigarette smokers are ingesting hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, lead, arsenic, ammonia and radioactive elements like uranium, benzene and carbon monoxide, among many others, it's no wonder that smokers’ gut health is imperiled as these toxins slay the microbes in their intestines.
It's not just gut microorganisms smokers are killing off either; they're also aiding their own premature demise. Tobacco kills half its users, a shocking statistic that sees some 7 million people around the world die from smoking-related diseases each year, almost 1 million of whom don’t smoke, but inhale second-hand tobacco smoke of others. It's a deadly business and many smokers are heading to a vape store to get e-cigarettes to help them quit their unhealthy habit for good.
Breath of Fresh Air for Gut Microbiome
A new study on vaping and gut health involved researchers in the US and UK and examined fecal, saliva and mouth samples from 30 participants: 10 smokers, 10 vapers and 10 people who neither smoked nor vaped, but were used as a control group for the research.
The results showed that tobacco smokers had greatly reduced microbial diversity in their intestines, which the researchers called “striking” and said “may have important consequences for health and the risk of certain diseases.” However, those who were using e-cigarettes had the same, healthy level of gut bacteria and other microbes as the control group of non-smokers.
“More investigation is needed, but to find that vaping is less-damaging than smoking on our gut bacteria adds to the incentive to change to e-cigarettes and for people to use them as a tool to quit smoking completely,” lead researcher Christopher Stewart said.
