There is a controversy brewing in the e-cigarette world that centers around the seemingly innocuous topic of buttery flavored e-liquids. While the average person may have never even heard of diacetyl, it’s been on the lips—literally and figuratively—of vapers for the last seven years, and it’s landed at least one high-end e-liquid company in some hot water.
“Everyone knew about diacetyl,” Russ Wishtart, host of the vaping podcast Click Bang! who has done a number of episodes on the topic, told me.
Diacetyl (DA) is a chemical used in food flavoring. It infuses food with a creamy, buttery taste, so it’s usually found in products that have butter, cheese, or caramel flavors. Diacetyl and acetyl propionyl (AP)—a kind of “sister chemical” that is nearly identical to DA—are also found in many flavored vaping liquids, especially those with a “dessert” flavor (think butterscotch, vanilla, or caramel).When you eat or drink something that contains diacetyl, it’s considered harmless—it even occurs naturally in some milk products, and in a few wines and beers. But inhaling it is a different story, and can have serious health risks. Because of this, vapers have been concerned about the presence of DA and AP in e-juices for awhile now, and many trade organizations have limits on the levels of DA and AP that can be present in the liquids they stock.
Over the last few years, manufacturers and vendors have been testing their products for these chemicals, sharing the results with consumers, and altering recipes to eliminate them. That process really ramped up towards the end of last year when researchers published a paper in Nicotine and Tobacco Research that found, of the 159 sweet and creamy flavored e-liquids tested, 74 percent had DA, AP, or both.
"They were telling people that they had tested it and it was free of diacetyl"“The whole issue didn’t exist before we published our study,” said Konstantinos Farsalinos, a researcher at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Greece, and lead author of the study. “There were discussions in e-cigarette consumer forums—vapers forums—on the internet, but there was no discussion in the scientific community. So we learned a lot from vapers.”In the wake of the study, many e-liquid companies scrambled to test their products and ease customers’ minds. But at least one company has now come under fire for not revealing the high levels of AP in some of its liquids, even though it knew about these levels for months.
Five Pawns is a high-end e-liquid manufacturer based in California. The company commissioned a lab to test its liquids as early as May of 2014. But the company didn’t release any results publicly until June of this year, after a UK-based e-cigarette retailer published its own lab results on Five Pawns products. Five Pawns ordered those results taken down via a cease and desist order, and wrote on its website that those tests were “fraudulent,” publishing its own lab results instead.But even Five Pawns' own tests showed alarmingly high rates of AP in some liquids. In Farsalinos’s study, the researchers converted National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health limits on diacetyl inhalation to determine an estimated safe amount to inhale through vaping. For AP, that limit was 137 micrograms per day. One of Five Pawns’ flavors had AP levels of 627.7 micrograms per millilitre. I couldn’t find any formal studies on the volume of e-liquid vapers smoke per day, but an online survey of users by E-Cigarette Forum found the plurality of respondents (22.6 percent) smoke four to five millilitres per day. A majority of respondents (59.8 percent) said they smoke between two and six millilitres per day.
What really bothered Wishtart and others in the vaping community wasn’t the high levels, but that Five Pawns had spent the past few months assuring vendors and customers that its products didn’t contain any DA or AP at all. Five Pawns declined to be interviewed for this story.
Resource: http://motherboard.vice.com
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