Formaldehyde In Vapes? Exposing Another Chemical Scare
The anti-vaping crusade highlights the fatal flaw in all chemophobia
Imagine if well-funded activist groups and even government policymakers issued dire warnings that you shouldn’t eat rice or drink apple juice because those foods contain arsenic, a deadly poison.
Sounds scary! And it’s even true. Apple juice and rice really do contain arsenic. But it’s also wholly misleading, since trace amounts of arsenic are found in many of the foods we eat every day, and there is no evidence that these levels of exposure cause us any harm.
Or imagine if an archipelago of nonprofits sprung up to advocate for outlawing sunscreen because it might cause allergic reactions, or bike helmets because they could lead to neck injuries, or aspirin because it can sometimes cause stomach bleeding. Such advocacy would be ludicrous. Sunscreen protects us from harmful UV rays, bike helmets prevent fatal head injuries, and aspirin can save lives.
But the same tortured logic that scares us away from nutritious foods, or promotes bans on useful and protective products because of limited side effects is regularly used to attack nicotine vaping products.
For instance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asserts that “vaping can expose you to formaldehyde, which is used in taxidermy!” [emphasis in original] Aping FDA, the tobacco industry-funded Truth Initiative warns that nicotine vapor “contains … formaldehyde (used to embalm the dead).” Likewise, in Australia, a well-funded campaign alleges that e-cigarettes contain formaldehyde, a chemical “meant for dead bodies not living ones.”
The website for FDA’s “Real Cost” anti-vaping campaign
These misleading and scaremongering references to some of formaldehyde’s many uses expose the vapid nature of anti-vaping activism, and of most anti-chemical campaigning more generally. Treating the public as if they were idiots, this rhetoric counts on the insinuation that if a chemical is harmful in some very specific circumstance or far-fetched hypothetical, it must be harmful in any and every potential use.
Nobody drinks sunscreen, eats aspirin like breakfast cereal, or uses a bicycle helmet as a pillow. And nobody encounters nearly enough formaldehyde in their daily lives to be cause for any concern.
Formaldehyde in vapes?
Formaldehyde is a naturally occurring organic compound. It’s an essential component of various biological processes, including the synthesis of amino acids and proteins; with every breath you exhale a little bit of formaldehyde. As we explained recently, the chemical is found in foods like apples and fish as well as a variety of consumer and medical products; it’s also produced in small quantities during any combustion process, including cooking.
At high concentrations found almost exclusively in industrial settings, formaldehyde is potentially harmful, but this fact is irrelevant to most people, because they will never encounter such concentrations in their daily lives.
People who vape nicotine are no exception. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the average daily intake of formaldehyde from all sources is estimated at 1.5-14 milligrams (mg). According to a 2017 study, the concentration of formaldehyde in nicotine vapor under realistic vaping conditions is about 3.4 micrograms (μg) per 10 puffs. Another recent study that tested newer vaping devices found levels of formaldehyde as low as 0.05 μg per puff.
In other words, vaping exposes users to a dose of formaldehyde hundreds of times below the WHO’s estimate for total daily exposure, a dose even lower than the amount in some vaccines. For context, we have approximately 2.5 mg of formaldehyde in every liter of blood circulating through our bodies.There is zero reason to suspect that the tiny dose of formaldehyde in nicotine vapor poses any meaningful risk to human health.
Moreover, the vast majority of people who vape are adult former smokers, the CDC reports. Because cigarettes contain far higher levels of formaldehyde (60 to 283 μg according to one study), individuals who switch to nicotine vaping significantly reduce their exposure to this chemical, by an estimated 98.8 percent according to a 2022 study published in the prestigious journal Nature.
In fact, a study published last May showed that people who vape don’t differ very much from non-nicotine users in their exposure to many harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke:
“Exclusive [vape] users did not significantly differ from past 30-day tobacco nonusers in inferred exposure to many [harmful chemicals], and in many cases the observed … values were very similar in magnitude.”
Any campaign designed to educate the public about vaping would have to include this information to contextualize the issue. The fact that FDA and other health authorities don’t even mention it is inexcusable.
Experts fed up
Many experts are fed up with the formaldehyde-in-vapor propaganda and have called on their colleagues to repudiate it. As far back as 2015, tobacco control experts Konstantinos Farsalinos and Clive Bates, along with 40 of their colleagues, wrote an open letter demanding the retraction of the original study alleging that formaldehyde could harm vapers. The paper “was based on completely unrealistic e-cigarette measurements using a flawed methodology,” Bates noted in a blog post summarizing the controversy.
They’re not alone. In a piece meant to undermine Bates’ and Farsalinos’s criticism, Bloomberg inadvertently let slip just how crucial their research had been to limiting the damage done by the formaldehyde lies. “In a 2018 review,” Bloomberg reported, “Public Health England dismissed potential formaldehyde risks, repeatedly citing Farsalinos’s work.” And thank goodness they did.
A familiar pattern
The disingenuous crusade against formaldehyde in nicotine vapor is just one example of a well-worn tactic anti-chemical activists use to attack any product they don’t like. Whether it’s formaldehyde in hair care products, drinking water, vaccines, building material, or nicotine vapes, the formula is identical: exaggerate the chemical’s risks, ignore its benefits, and never ever ever let the public remember the age-old adage that the poison is in the dose.
The compliant media–always happy to run a chemical scare story, sometimes in exchange for payola–repeats the activist claim and, boom, a new scandal is born. This invites multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against chemical manufacturers and inane regulations from indifferent bureaucrats who ignore their own research to give the chemophobic campaign a veneer of legitimacy.
The losers in all this are all of us, the public that benefits from the application of various life-enhancing chemicals for their intended uses. When activists complain about formaldehyde in vaccines, for example, they discourage parents from immunizing their kids against deadly infectious diseases.
The same can be said of smokers who are discouraged from switching to vapes. In the name of reducing formaldehyde exposure that is already vanishingly small, the anti-vaping warriors have effectively urged people to continue using tobacco products that contain vastly higher quantities of the compound and kill some six million users annually. They manipulate public policy and deprive people–in this case smokers looking to quit–of products that could preserve their health and even save their lives.
Anti-chemical crusades aren’t just foolish, they’re deadly. Governments who set policy based on such scaremongering do so at their own peril.