A health expert has revealed the consequences of vaping, and how e-cigarettes could affect your health in the future.

Vaping researcher Lynne Dawkins said that “harmful compounds” had been found in the vapour, though their levels were much lower than the toxic elements found in tobacco smoke.

Dr Dawkins said: “If cigarettes were introduced to the market today, we'd know straight away that these are extremely harmful because technology and methods have improved so much.

“We now know that there are 7,000 different compounds in tobacco smoke, 70 of which are known to cause cancer.

The Argus:

“We can do the same with the vapour, and we have found some detectable levels of potentially harmful compounds, but they’re so much lower.

“From that, we can kind of extrapolate that the long-term effects are going to be nowhere near as harmful as smoking.”

Speaking to Lad Bible, Dr Dawkins said there was evidence of some carcinogenic compounds present, and a risk of respiratory disease, but that the risks are “far lower than smoking”.

While plenty of research is being carried out into potential problems caused by flavourings, Dr Dawkins said: “At this stage, there’s nothing alarming going on, but we just don’t have all the answers yet.

“I guess my key message would be that with all this focus on vaping, we forget how very harmful smoking is – it kills more than 8 million people a year globally.

“We can think about how harmful vaping is, but we're talking about characterising that 5 per cent of the residual harm when smoking is still a massive public health problem across the globe.”