Suspect your school-age daughter or son is smoking? More than anything else, they're likely using electronic cigarettes. Middle and high schoolers seem to be rapidly replacing more traditional tobacco products, such as cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, with e-cigs, according to the latest data from United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although e-cigarettes may seem safer because they don't produce the same combustion products that regular cigarettes do, they still contain nicotine, which studies show is especially addictive to young people.
Last year, two million American high schoolers and 450,000 middle schoolers used an e-cigarette within 30 days of being surveyed, the CDC found. Since 2011, the overall number of sixth- through twelfth-graders who have used tobacco in the last 30 days stayed the same, at 4.6 million. However, the number of youthful e-cigarette users tripled between 2013 and 2014. In fact, 2014 was the first year since the CDC began collecting such data that kids' use of e-cigarettes outpaced any other tobacco product. Hookah also significantly gained in popularity between 2013 and 2014; it's now the second-most popular tobacco product among middle and high school students.
[For more of this story, written by Francie Diep, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an...ens-smoke-more-ecigs]
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