Differences between tea cigarettes and traditional cigarettes and electronic cigarettes

In traditional cigarettes, the most important ingredient is nicotine, and it also includes more than 60 kinds of ingredients that are harmful to human health, such as tar and carbon monoxide.

The e-cigarette mainly heats the e-liquid through the heating coil and atomizes it into vapor for inhalation. Although harmful substances such as tar and suspended particles are reduced to a certain extent, nicotine still exists.

Tea cigarettes mainly use tea to replace the cut tobacco in traditional cigarettes, which is synonymous with health preservation in the public’s impression, so the merchants sell well all the way under the banner of “health” and “smoking cessation”. While the health benefits of it are unknown.

Zhu Yi, an associate professor at the School of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University, said that although tea cigarettes do not contain nicotine, they can also produce carbon monoxide, tar, and inhalable particulate matter during the burning process.

The main material of tea cigarettes is tea, which does not belong to tobacco products; at the same time, it does not belong to the category of food due to the use and other reasons. This makes the position of regulation slightly embarrassing, and neither a food production license nor a tobacco monopoly production enterprise license can be obtained.

Without these licenses, it is difficult to guarantee the quality of tea cigarettes produced, and there are certain safety hazards. The Shanghai Advertising Monitoring Center previously found out when testing some tea cigarette products:

Some tea cigarettes not only contain tar, but the content is not low, reaching 14.41mg/cig, which exceeds the national cigarette standard (in 2013, it was stipulated that it should not exceed 11mg, otherwise it would not be able to enter the market). It can be seen that tea cigarettes are not harmless as claimed.

Regarding the effect of tea cigarettes on smoking cessation, Xiao Dan, director of the Tobacco Diseases and Smoking Cessation Center of China-Japan Friendship Hospital, said: At present, there is no sufficient scientific basis to confirm that the test is helpful for smoking cessation. Inhaled particulate matter and other harmful substances will make long-term inhalation threaten health.

Although tea cigarettes contain beneficial ingredients such as theanine, tea polyphenols, and minerals, there is no sufficient evidence to show that it can be absorbed by the human body through puffing.