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But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine? I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smokin

But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine? I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?

bayindirh 2y ago
Nicotine addiction is chronic and very hard to break. You can reset caffeine tolerance and dependence in 10 days.
- madog 2y ago
  Actually with vaping it becomes pretty easy to quit. You just taper down the nicotine slowly until you're on nothing and eventually you just kind of stop because you don't feel the need to do it anymore.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    What about body's response? Is it easy to curb? I was drinking 2 liters of coffee per day while finishing my Ph.D.. Next week I wasn't drinking, and after that I occasionally drank half a cup per day. This was seven years ago, and I still drink half a cup, because I like the taste of coffee. I have at least a dozen vaping friends who said they started to stop smoking. Now at least half of them have heavily souped up, customized e-cigs. Two of them are making their own liquids with nicotine, rest are using bog-standard vapes. None of them stopped smoking or nicotine intake, which was the goal of all of them.
    - zachturn 2y ago
      This is such an edge case on quitting a caffeine addiction. 2 liters is an INSANE amount of coffee to be drinking daily. Kudos to you but let's not pretend this is the average experience of people breaking even much milder levels of caffeine consumption.
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        I did my research before letting coffee loose on my body. The coffee acts by blocking tiredness/sleep receptors on the brain, so brain builds more of them to work normally. This is how coffee dependence and tolerance builds. When you stop coffee, brain detects that the number of receptors is too high and starts to break them down. This is why you get the headaches. That "one week" period is not an edge case, it's the science of it. If it was proved to be harder on that research, I'd never let my body to reach 2L/day levels.
        itsoktocry 2y ago
        >I did my research before letting coffee loose on my body. Was this research similar to you drawing conclusions about nicotine based on the handful of your friends that vape?
        bayindirh 2y ago
        Yes. I read papers about both subjects. Also read papers about other drugs because of an addicted friend who I don't talk with anymore. What I gave was an example, and looks like you're upset about it. Please keep in mind that while itsoktocry, itsnotoktosnark at HN [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        freedomben 2y ago
        fwiw I thought this comment was the snarky one, not GP. Given that this snarky comment also tried to call out GP for snark and refer to the HN guidelines against snark, it also became highly ironic. I would guess that's why you've been downvoted.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        That comment is not my best by any means, and I see where you’re coming from, and respect your view. Thanks for bringing it up. However, language is both subjective and culture dependent (plus, words doesn’t carry tone and sound). If somebody asks the same question the same way in my native language to my face, it’s not only snarky, but it’s rude (and mildly offensive depending on the context). I don’t think I’m expected to know the all possible cultural styles, and take anything and everything kindly and politely, all day, every day. Henceforth, I tone matched the comment according to my perception. I might be correct or wrong according some dominant discussion culture here, and people may perceive me the snarkier one according to their cultures. I can’t judge them, but this doesn’t change the fact that the style of question is rude on my side, and I have the right to respond equally (to my perception). Normally I’m a much softer person and don’t write sharp comments, so that one is an exception. Lastly I’ll be posting a research tome on caffeine addiction/withdrawal to the person who asked, so you might one to follow that thread too. Have a nice day :)
  - Salgat 2y ago
    Easier != Easy
  - DontchaKnowit 2y ago
    Honestly cigs were way easier to quit cause theyre inconvenient. Vapes can be used anywhere discretely.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Can you link a study for this? I'd like to read more.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Here's a small research tome I collected yesterday. Please note that I have access to all of the papers' full texts. I was unable to find the original papers I read at that time (i.e. 7 years ago!), but found the video which brought me to the entrance of the rabbit hole. - The base video I have talked about is from TedED. It's here [0]. - This study was done on rats in 1985 but verifies that caffeine tolerance is real [1]. - Another controlled study on humans about caffeine tolerance [2] involved one group taking caffeine and the others taking a placebo. Caffeine drinkers taking the placebo reported withdrawal symptoms, and non-drinkers taking caffeine reported overstimulation. - A meta-study [3] details the symptoms and durations of caffeine withdrawal's effects. The paper cites that effects persist between 2 to 9 days, and the peak of the syndrome is around 20 to 51 hours. It also notes that caffeine introduction during this phase alleviates symptoms (This study basically confirms that what I have gone through after I stopped drinking coffee as I noted in a previous comment). - This interesting study [4] explores the body's caffeine response via blood pressure change. Subjects are administered high doses of caffeine, and blood pressure is monitored. After day three, the blood pressure normalizes, and spikes disappear. The abstinence required to reset the pressure response is less than three weeks, pointing that the body resets caffeine tolerance in less than three weeks. If you need the papers, or want more resources, please let me know. Have a nice day. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjvYRgjCyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjvYRgjCyU [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/002432058590325X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024320585... [2]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245285 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245285 [3]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x [4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC370671/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC370671/
lobsterthief 2y ago
Yes, nicotine is much worse than caffeine for your heart.
uniqueuid 2y ago
There are many studies on the effect of nicotine. I would look for several meta-analyses or umbrella (meta-meta) analyses. Ideally reporting all-cause mortality. Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167527322013158 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675... [edit] To compare that to caffeine, this study does not see a significant risk increase for coffee drinkers. So it seems that vaping is objectively more harmful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ [edit2] And an umbrella review, because I like them a lot: This shows that negative effects of high coffee intake mostly disappear when controlling for smoking. Note this paper has a correction, which I think is a great sign of credibility. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024 https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024
- jorvi 2y ago
  You are conflating the harms of the delivery mechanism with the harms of the substance. Nicotine gum is relatively harmless for example. Or perhaps imbibe on a Nicotini[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini
  - uniqueuid 2y ago
    You're right that these studies measure the product, not the substance. But TFA is about vaping, and I am referring to that. [edit] Seems that nicotine is not really harmless, even in gum or patches: double the risk of heart palpitations and chest pains, 1.67 the risk of nausea and vomiting, 1.5 times the risk of gastrointestinal complaints, and 1.4 times the risk of insomnia. Of course, if you measure anything this closely with >100k participants in RCTs, it's bound to have a significant effect. But these odds ratios are not exactly small. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      Are those numbers comparable to caffeine?
alphazard 2y ago
Really nothing; you're correct to think of it in the same category as caffeine. Both addictive, yet safe. But vaporizers have more than nicotine. There's other chemicals needed to produce vaporizer fluid, and it's far too soon to tell if they are safe. Even though most of them have been in the food supply, they haven't been inhaled at scale. We already found one that wasn't safe (Vitamin E Acetate), because it was causing very obvious problems. What about the non-obvious problems? A more direct comparison to caffeine is a nicotine (not tobacco) pouch.
- user_7832 2y ago
  Aren’t nicotine’s vasoconstriction worse than coffee’s (at regular consumption levels)?
gwbas1c 2y ago
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Quitting cigarettes is about as hard as quitting heroin. In contrast, quitting coffee is much, much easier. On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my head that told me it was "a good idea to go have a cigarette on the porch once I get out of bed," or "it's a good idea to have a cigarette when you get home." It was really creepy, I've never had a substance put ideas in my head 24+ hours after it was out of my system.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I've thankfully never had to quit cigarettes or heroin, but in my experience quitting coffee is awful. 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea. And the whole time you're thinking, "all this could go away with just one little cup of coffee, which all the studies say has health benefits even. Just one little cup"
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea... A single sip of coffee, or a cup of good black tea generally alleviates these symptoms. I had to drink a sip of coffee on day 4 while quitting coffee, and all my headache was gone.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    Why quit coffee if it has health benefits?
    - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
      Great question! A couple of reasons. The simplest is that I dislike being dependent on any substance. A more nuanced reason is that I want to be able to use caffeine as a tool. A cup of coffee is the largest dose of caffeine that I am comfortable taking at any one time. If I already have caffeine tolerance at the level of a daily coffee habit, caffeine has lost much of its utility to me. However, if my tolerance is lower than that, I can really feel it when I do occasionally have use for a cup of coffee (e.g. the day before code freeze.) Currently my caffeine intake is a cup of tea[0]. This is at the level where I don't hate myself if I miss it[1], and I can still use coffee as a tool on occasion. Also, you can pry my tea out of my cold dead hands. [0] Note that how much caffeine a cup of tea has is much more nuanced than "black vs green". Cultivar, terroir, steep time are much more important to caffeine levels than how the tea is processed. In fact if anything, green tea cultivars have been shown to have, on average, very slightly more caffeine than black[2]. [1] I feel it, but it's not 3-5 days of migraines [2] Y. Zuo et al, Simultaneous determination of catechins, caffeine and gallic acids in green, Oolong, black and pu-erh teas using HPLC with a photodiode array detector, Talanta 57 (2002) 307–316
interludead 2y ago
Nicotine is a highly addictive stimulant

But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine? I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?

bayindirh 2y ago

Nicotine addiction is chronic and very hard to break. You can reset caffeine tolerance and dependence in 10 days.

madog 2y ago
Actually with vaping it becomes pretty easy to quit. You just taper down the nicotine slowly until you're on nothing and eventually you just kind of stop because you don't feel the need to do it anymore.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  What about body's response? Is it easy to curb? I was drinking 2 liters of coffee per day while finishing my Ph.D.. Next week I wasn't drinking, and after that I occasionally drank half a cup per day. This was seven years ago, and I still drink half a cup, because I like the taste of coffee. I have at least a dozen vaping friends who said they started to stop smoking. Now at least half of them have heavily souped up, customized e-cigs. Two of them are making their own liquids with nicotine, rest are using bog-standard vapes. None of them stopped smoking or nicotine intake, which was the goal of all of them.
  - zachturn 2y ago
    This is such an edge case on quitting a caffeine addiction. 2 liters is an INSANE amount of coffee to be drinking daily. Kudos to you but let's not pretend this is the average experience of people breaking even much milder levels of caffeine consumption.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      I did my research before letting coffee loose on my body. The coffee acts by blocking tiredness/sleep receptors on the brain, so brain builds more of them to work normally. This is how coffee dependence and tolerance builds. When you stop coffee, brain detects that the number of receptors is too high and starts to break them down. This is why you get the headaches. That "one week" period is not an edge case, it's the science of it. If it was proved to be harder on that research, I'd never let my body to reach 2L/day levels.
      - itsoktocry 2y ago
        >I did my research before letting coffee loose on my body. Was this research similar to you drawing conclusions about nicotine based on the handful of your friends that vape?
        bayindirh 2y ago
        Yes. I read papers about both subjects. Also read papers about other drugs because of an addicted friend who I don't talk with anymore. What I gave was an example, and looks like you're upset about it. Please keep in mind that while itsoktocry, itsnotoktosnark at HN [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        freedomben 2y ago
        fwiw I thought this comment was the snarky one, not GP. Given that this snarky comment also tried to call out GP for snark and refer to the HN guidelines against snark, it also became highly ironic. I would guess that's why you've been downvoted.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        That comment is not my best by any means, and I see where you’re coming from, and respect your view. Thanks for bringing it up. However, language is both subjective and culture dependent (plus, words doesn’t carry tone and sound). If somebody asks the same question the same way in my native language to my face, it’s not only snarky, but it’s rude (and mildly offensive depending on the context). I don’t think I’m expected to know the all possible cultural styles, and take anything and everything kindly and politely, all day, every day. Henceforth, I tone matched the comment according to my perception. I might be correct or wrong according some dominant discussion culture here, and people may perceive me the snarkier one according to their cultures. I can’t judge them, but this doesn’t change the fact that the style of question is rude on my side, and I have the right to respond equally (to my perception). Normally I’m a much softer person and don’t write sharp comments, so that one is an exception. Lastly I’ll be posting a research tome on caffeine addiction/withdrawal to the person who asked, so you might one to follow that thread too. Have a nice day :)
- Salgat 2y ago
  Easier != Easy
- DontchaKnowit 2y ago
  Honestly cigs were way easier to quit cause theyre inconvenient. Vapes can be used anywhere discretely.
shepherdjerred 2y ago
Can you link a study for this? I'd like to read more.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Here's a small research tome I collected yesterday. Please note that I have access to all of the papers' full texts. I was unable to find the original papers I read at that time (i.e. 7 years ago!), but found the video which brought me to the entrance of the rabbit hole. - The base video I have talked about is from TedED. It's here [0]. - This study was done on rats in 1985 but verifies that caffeine tolerance is real [1]. - Another controlled study on humans about caffeine tolerance [2] involved one group taking caffeine and the others taking a placebo. Caffeine drinkers taking the placebo reported withdrawal symptoms, and non-drinkers taking caffeine reported overstimulation. - A meta-study [3] details the symptoms and durations of caffeine withdrawal's effects. The paper cites that effects persist between 2 to 9 days, and the peak of the syndrome is around 20 to 51 hours. It also notes that caffeine introduction during this phase alleviates symptoms (This study basically confirms that what I have gone through after I stopped drinking coffee as I noted in a previous comment). - This interesting study [4] explores the body's caffeine response via blood pressure change. Subjects are administered high doses of caffeine, and blood pressure is monitored. After day three, the blood pressure normalizes, and spikes disappear. The abstinence required to reset the pressure response is less than three weeks, pointing that the body resets caffeine tolerance in less than three weeks. If you need the papers, or want more resources, please let me know. Have a nice day. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjvYRgjCyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjvYRgjCyU [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/002432058590325X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024320585... [2]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245285 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02245285 [3]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x [4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC370671/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC370671/

lobsterthief 2y ago

Yes, nicotine is much worse than caffeine for your heart.

uniqueuid 2y ago

There are many studies on the effect of nicotine. I would look for several meta-analyses or umbrella (meta-meta) analyses. Ideally reporting all-cause mortality. Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167527322013158 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675... [edit] To compare that to caffeine, this study does not see a significant risk increase for coffee drinkers. So it seems that vaping is objectively more harmful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ [edit2] And an umbrella review, because I like them a lot: This shows that negative effects of high coffee intake mostly disappear when controlling for smoking. Note this paper has a correction, which I think is a great sign of credibility. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024 https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024

jorvi 2y ago
You are conflating the harms of the delivery mechanism with the harms of the substance. Nicotine gum is relatively harmless for example. Or perhaps imbibe on a Nicotini[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini
- uniqueuid 2y ago
  You're right that these studies measure the product, not the substance. But TFA is about vaping, and I am referring to that. [edit] Seems that nicotine is not really harmless, even in gum or patches: double the risk of heart palpitations and chest pains, 1.67 the risk of nausea and vomiting, 1.5 times the risk of gastrointestinal complaints, and 1.4 times the risk of insomnia. Of course, if you measure anything this closely with >100k participants in RCTs, it's bound to have a significant effect. But these odds ratios are not exactly small. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Are those numbers comparable to caffeine?

alphazard 2y ago

Really nothing; you're correct to think of it in the same category as caffeine. Both addictive, yet safe. But vaporizers have more than nicotine. There's other chemicals needed to produce vaporizer fluid, and it's far too soon to tell if they are safe. Even though most of them have been in the food supply, they haven't been inhaled at scale. We already found one that wasn't safe (Vitamin E Acetate), because it was causing very obvious problems. What about the non-obvious problems? A more direct comparison to caffeine is a nicotine (not tobacco) pouch.

user_7832 2y ago
Aren’t nicotine’s vasoconstriction worse than coffee’s (at regular consumption levels)?

gwbas1c 2y ago

Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Quitting cigarettes is about as hard as quitting heroin. In contrast, quitting coffee is much, much easier. On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my head that told me it was "a good idea to go have a cigarette on the porch once I get out of bed," or "it's a good idea to have a cigarette when you get home." It was really creepy, I've never had a substance put ideas in my head 24+ hours after it was out of my system.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago
I've thankfully never had to quit cigarettes or heroin, but in my experience quitting coffee is awful. 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea. And the whole time you're thinking, "all this could go away with just one little cup of coffee, which all the studies say has health benefits even. Just one little cup"
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea... A single sip of coffee, or a cup of good black tea generally alleviates these symptoms. I had to drink a sip of coffee on day 4 while quitting coffee, and all my headache was gone.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Why quit coffee if it has health benefits?
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    Great question! A couple of reasons. The simplest is that I dislike being dependent on any substance. A more nuanced reason is that I want to be able to use caffeine as a tool. A cup of coffee is the largest dose of caffeine that I am comfortable taking at any one time. If I already have caffeine tolerance at the level of a daily coffee habit, caffeine has lost much of its utility to me. However, if my tolerance is lower than that, I can really feel it when I do occasionally have use for a cup of coffee (e.g. the day before code freeze.) Currently my caffeine intake is a cup of tea[0]. This is at the level where I don't hate myself if I miss it[1], and I can still use coffee as a tool on occasion. Also, you can pry my tea out of my cold dead hands. [0] Note that how much caffeine a cup of tea has is much more nuanced than "black vs green". Cultivar, terroir, steep time are much more important to caffeine levels than how the tea is processed. In fact if anything, green tea cultivars have been shown to have, on average, very slightly more caffeine than black[2]. [1] I feel it, but it's not 3-5 days of migraines [2] Y. Zuo et al, Simultaneous determination of catechins, caffeine and gallic acids in green, Oolong, black and pu-erh teas using HPLC with a photodiode array detector, Talanta 57 (2002) 307–316

interludead 2y ago

Nicotine is a highly addictive stimulant