Avoid smoking altogether, your insurer will advise

I RECENTLY stopped smoking after a long battle with medication.

The only thing that worked for me was my electronic cigarette. I feel better than I have in years and I don’t crave smoking.

How does this affect my life insurance because technically I am no longer smoking cigarettes but I do have nicotine in my system?

Gareth Friedlander, head of research and development at Discovery Life, responded: Vaporisers might be better for you from a health perspective than cigarettes although even this factor requires further research.

However, from an underwriting perspective on life insurance, smoking is a binary rating factor.

You are either a smoker or a nonsmoker and in this context, smoking a vaporiser is a higher risk than being a non-smoker.

Smoking is a continuous spectrum of risk and should not really be a binary rating factor but there are challenges in being able to verify how much a person smokes.

So, while we recognise that smoking one vaporiser might be better for you than smoking one cigarette, there is no evidence to suggest that incessant vaporising is better than smoking cigarettes occasionally and a client who only smokes occasionally is still considered a smoker for life insurance purposes and therefore so would a client who uses vaporises.

Often people use both vaporisers and cigarettes and there is no scientific way to test for the different ways of using nicotine.