A new study out of the United Kingdom is undercutting one of vaping’s favorite selling points: that swapping cigarettes for a vape pen is basically harmless.
“In active, healthy young adults with normal lungs, both vapes and tobacco smoking led to worsened exercise capacity, shortness of breath and intense leg fatigue,” said Dr. Azmy Faisal, lead author of the study and a researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.
Faisal’s team published its findings July 14 in the journal ERJ Open Research, and the results land hard for anyone who assumed vaping was the safer alternative to smoking.
“Like smoking, our research indicates that vaping can lead to harmful changes to the blood vessels, lung efficiency during exercise and approximately a 15 percent reduction in fitness compared to those who have never smoked or vaped,” Faisal said.
Researchers recruited 75 people between ages 18 and 30, split evenly into three groups: people who had never smoked or vaped, longtime cigarette smokers and vapers of about three years who had never touched a cigarette. Each volunteer pedaled a stationary bike to exhaustion while scientists tracked heart rate, breathing and blood lactate, then ran ultrasounds and blood draws to check how well their arteries were functioning.
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Both the vapers and the smokers hit their limit roughly 15% sooner than their peers who avoided nicotine altogether, with lower oxygen uptake, faster lactic acid buildup and more breathlessness and leg discomfort. Scans and blood samples also turned up inflammation in the blood vessels of vapers and smokers alike, the kind of early warning sign doctors watch for years before heart disease shows up.
“These findings provide critical information for the general public, healthcare providers, and regulatory authorities regarding potential early risks associated with vape use, particularly for the growing number of young adults who have never smoked but choose to use these products,” Faisal added. “Additionally, our study supports the UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, which prohibits vaping for individuals under 18 and aims to reduce vaping among young adults in the future.”
Dr. Stamatoula Tsikrika, a member of the European Respiratory Society’s expert group on tobacco, smoking control and health education based at Sotiria Hospital in Athens, Greece, was not involved in the research but weighed in on what it means for a generation raised on flavored nicotine.
“More and more young people who have never smoked are using vapes,” Tsikrika said. “As the popularity of vaping continues to rise, so too do concerns that it is becoming normalized behavior, functioning as a gateway to nicotine addiction and introducing serious health risks.”
Even Britain’s National Health Service, which still recommends vaping as a tool for adult smokers trying to quit, hedges its bets. A statement on the NHS website reads: “Vaping is not completely harmless and we don’t know yet what the long-term effects may be.”
Movieguide® has flagged vaping onscreen for years, noting the vape pen popping up in coming-of-age dramas like BEN IS BACK and AFTER, and satirized outright in NOT OKAY. Hollywood rarely treats the habit as anything more than a character quirk or a punchline, which makes studies like this one worth putting in front of families before the culture does the opposite.
Parents raising teenagers in a culture that treats vaping as a harmless accessory now have real data for the kitchen-table conversation, not a lecture, just facts about what a vape pen actually does to a young, healthy body.
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