Photo: Shutterstock This is revealed in a study conducted by Erna Krüsemann, a PhD student at Human Nutrition and Health.
‘E-cigarettes cause less damage than smoking tobacco, and are thus an attractive alternative for smokers seeking to quit smoking tobacco’, Krüsemann says. ‘However, the vapours contain toxic and addictive substances, such as nicotine, which makes the use of e-cigarettes unsafe.’ Non-smokers who use e-cigarettes increase their health risks. The majority of the people who use e-cigarettes are smokers or people who have smoked in the past. However, the item is gaining popularity among youths. Over one in four secondary school students have used an e-cigarette on at least one occasion in the past few years.
Flavours
One of the main attractions of e-cigarettes is the wide range of flavours. The liquid used in the e-cigarette is available in 245 different flavours in the Netherlands, most of which are sweet and fruity: flavours such as pineapple, chocolate, muffin, menthol or mojito. The flavours are added to hide the bitter taste of nicotine. Menthol soothes the throat.
A survey conducted by Krüsemann and colleagues showed that half the smokers in the Netherlands are primarily interested in e-cigarettes with a tobacco or menthol-mint flavour. While those who had never smoked tobacco or used an e-cigarette before were more drawn to sweet and menthol/mint flavours. Individuals that use e-cigarettes but do not smoke also indicated they regularly used sweet and fruity flavours. All in all, sweet flavours are popular.
Sweet and menthol
Moreover, Krüsemann asked participants to “taste” different flavours. Because it would be ethically inappropriate to have non-smoking participants vape, the flavour test was conducted by allowing the participants to smell the flavours. This method had been shown to work just as well in Küsemann’s earlier studies. Krüsemann observed that smoking adults and non-smoking youngsters (under 18 years) and young adults (aged 20 to 25) prefer sweet and minty flavours to the flavour of tobacco.
Krüsemann: ‘Further research is needed to gain more insight into why smokers do not prefer e-liquids with a tobacco flavour while they did indicate this preference in the survey, and whether this applies to all available tobacco-flavoured e-liquids. It is difficult to mimic the exact flavour of burnt and unburnt tobacco, so it may have just been that the resemblance to real tobacco was insufficient. Moreover, it is unclear whether the results also apply to e-liquids with nicotine, which were left out of the test for ethical reasons.
Prohibited
Based on, among others, this study, the State Secretary of Health, Welfare and Sports has announced all flavours except that of tobacco are to be prohibited in e-liquids. This is to make the use of e-cigarettes less attractive to youths and non-smokers.
Krüsemann conducted the study at the National Institute for Public Health and Environment (Dutch acronym RIVM) under the commission of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports (Dutch acronym VWS). She obtained her PhD on 16 March.