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What´s the Difference Between Hookah and Cigarettes? Essay

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Have you ever wondered what the difference was between hookah and cigarettes? I have many times, being a person that occasionally indulges in hookah smoking, I was always curious to find out. Some of the questions I would ask myself, like which is more popular, which one is worse for you, what they are made of besides the obvious tobacco, and what the long term effects of both are. So this informative essay will be answering these very questions. Tobacco has been around for a long time, dating as far back as the Mayans in 600 to 900 A.D. (Unit 1: History of Tobacco, Worlded.org). In recent years tobacco has become much more popular with the younger generation such as college students, mainly in the hookah style (“The Dangers of Hookah …show more content…

(“What’s in a Cigarette?”, lung.org) Some of the only clear differences between the two are their ingredients. Cigarettes are made up of around 600 ingredients some of which are arsenic (used in rat poison), lead (used in batteries), and tar (used to pave roads), just to name a few. When a cigarette is burned it can create upwards of 7,000 chemicals, 69 of which are known to cause cancer (“What’s in a Cigarette?”, lung.org). Hookah may not have all the same ingredients as cigarettes, mainly just made of tobacco and artificial flavors, but it can still be just as deadly. Hookah users can faces some of the same health risks as cigarette users, oral cancer, lung cancer, stomach cancer are just some of them (“Hookah Smoking No Less Harmful Than Cigarettes”, Study Finds, huffingtonpost.com). Researchers from University of California, San Francisco, found in a study that the participants inhaled less nicotine in hookah, but levels of benzene byproducts and carbon monoxide were more than double that of cigarette smoke. So it’s almost like there is no lesser of two evils really because both have very similar and deadly lasting effects. To conclude, there are many similarities between cigarettes and hookah, more than you may have known prior to reading this essay. Either way you look at it they both are unhealthy for you and can cause an array of long term health effects, some of which causing death. Neither is better

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