Headline

The Safety of Hookah Smoking

The water pipe – hookah, narghile, shisha or goza in Arabic - has been used to smoke tobacco in the Middle East and Asia for centuries.

Hookah smoke is filtered through water before it is inhaled. This fact leads many people to believe that hookah smoking is safer than smoking cigarettes because the water in the hookah filters out all the "bad stuff". This is not true. Recent studies have found that hookah smokers actually ingest more nicotine than cigarette smokers because of the massive volume of smoke they inhale.

According to a World Health Organisation advisory, a typical one-hour session of hookah smoking exposes the user to 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette. Even after passing through the water, the tobacco smoke still contains high levels of toxic compounds, including carbon monoxide, heavy metals and cancer-causing chemicals (carcinogens). Hookah smoking also delivers significant levels of nicotine - the extremely addictive substance in tobacco.

The hookah smoking trend is a concern for doctors and public health experts because, despite the claims of many users, smoking from a hookah is proving to be even more dangerous than smoking a cigarette.