Vape Juice

If you visit vape stores or vape websites, you’re likely to see a wide selection of colorful pods, cartridges and bottles filled with flavored e-liquid, or best vape juice juice. The vape juice is heated in e-cigarettes and vape rigs, and it creates an aerosol that users inhale.

Vape juice comes in a variety of flavors, including candy, bubblegum and children’s cereals. Johns Hopkins cardiologist Michael Blaha, M.D., M.P.H., discusses vape flavors and other e-liquid ingredients, and how they may affect health, ejuice particularly for children and teens.

What is in vape juice?

Flavor is just one of the ingredients in e-liquid. Vape juices usually include nicotine and many other additives and chemicals, and Blaha says the unpredictable variety of ingredients is a problem. Even the heating coil, which allows the liquid to become an inhalable aerosol, releases new chemical substances and trace metals that go into the user’s lungs.

“There are so many ingredients in e-liquids, and to date, no one is taking responsibility to account for them,” notes Blaha. He explains that while there may be production standards for commercial e-cigarette companies, standards for vape shops, off-brand online vendors or “homemade” vape juice blends are less consistent.

“Vape juice can contain a variety of things that could be toxic,” Blaha says. There can be flavors, dyes, nicotine, THC (the ingredient in marijuana that causes a “high”) and other substances. “There are all kinds of concoctions,” he says. “For example, there are reports that people may put essential oils, multivitamins or traces of medicines into e-liquids.”