From veganism to vaping, our need to upgrade is unhealthy

Fads run the risk of being more injurious than what we first set out to counter

It requires only recent memory to recall how cigarettes were once woven into the fabric of British life: the friends who would routinely dart out into the wet night, crumpling soggy fag packets into jacket pockets on sheepishly returning to the dinner table; pubs a permanent, stalesmelling paean to Marlboro Lights; the suitcases full to bursting with enough duty-free gift boxes to see puff-happy friends and family through Christmas. Now, the smoking-only carts and carriages that once submerged the devoted behind the mist, Stars in Their Eyes-style, have all but disappeared. Cigarette butts wedged into the cracks of broken pavements feel like relics, their owners even more so.

Among an increasingly healthconscious public, cigarettes have fast lost ground to vaping, now a habit for 2.8million British adults (six million still smoke tobacco). But the speed with which we have adopted a device with only short-term research to its name has become more alarming since news of the first e-cigarette-linked death last week. A patient in Illinois was admitted to hospital “with unexplained illness after reported vaping” and is thought to have died of injuries caused by the lungs’ reaction to a caustic substance; 193 potential cases of similar serious respiratory disease have been identified across 22 more US states.

The health implications of vaping remain obscured beneath the wisps of its own cherry-flavoured fog. Beyond the capsules containing a liquid

mixture of nicotine, chemicals and flavourings that are exhaled as a vapour, there is little information of the meaningful, medical kind known about e-cigs whatsoever.

This is the problem with the direction medicine is taking: we know more about what kills us, but in our bid to constantly upgrade ourselves we are willing to ignore the potential pitfalls built into our shiny new model – or even to ask what they might be.

The fact tobacco has become passé is undoubtedly a good thing: the smoking ban, for example, led to a 40 per cent fall in heart attacks in Britain. But the race to replace it has led to an increasingly competitive market in which products need not demonstrate robust data to support their use, but just enough to edge them above rivals.

We are told that e-cigarettes contain nicotine but no tar or carbon monoxide; that they comprise fewer than the 7,000 toxic chemicals in the regular kind, but how many, we do not know. A 200-page report produced by the National College of Physicians in 2016 surmised that they are “not currently made to medicine’s standards”, but still concluded that “in the interests of public health it is important to promote the use of e-cigarettes”. A study last year found that vaping can damage the immune system’s lung-clearing function.

All of which is still better, researchers say, than using tobacco, which remains the leading cause of preventable death in the UK. But as more intricate understanding of our health develops, so too should clarity over credible alternatives to existing issues and unsubstantiated fads, the latter of which run the risk of being more injurious than what we set out to counter in the first place.

Some of the vaping-induced disease cases under investigation in the US concern THC or tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component in cannabis. Drugs are now far more commonly used than drinking and smoking among young people, who believe they are safer. Meanwhile, veganism has seen such a groundswell of support that a third of us have either reduced or done away with meat in our diets – even though evidence to suggest what we’re replacing it with is better for us, or the planet, remains scarce. Is a vegan sausage roll from Greggs a signifier of enlightened times, or just a more palatable distraction?

Yes, tackling problems once we realise the scale of them is important, but replacing current headaches with newer ones, about which we know less, is surely a pointless pursuit. High intensity interval classes may seem more appealing than going for a jog; swapping cows’ milk for a fashionable non-dairy alternative the same – add this to an ever-stretched NHS, with start-ups popping up like bloodhounds on the scent for a new moneymaking “health” opportunity, and you have the perfect misinformed storm.

A few years ago, e-cigarettes seemed like an unfortunate-smelling thought experiment of what you might get if you crossed a computer hardware store with Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Now, it is an industry worth £18billion, ubiquitous on every high street, outside every pub, inside restaurants, theatres and cafés. There will always be people willing to cash in on our desire to part with something bad, but an alternative that is simply less bad than its predecessor does not make it good.