Do you know what a hookah is? It’s a water pipe that’s used to smoke flavored tobacco. Some people may think that hookahs don’t have any negative effects on their health because they’re under the assumption that the tobacco is filtered by the water, but this isn’t true. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hookah smoking has some of the same negative health effects as cigarette smoking, and people who smoke hookah are more likely to absorb higher concentrations of the same toxins found in cigarette smoke. The CDC also reports that smoking hookah for an hour is equivalent to inhaling 100-200 times the smoke from a single cigarette. So, smoking a hookah is not a safe alternative to smoking cigarettes.

Hookah smoking has recently become very popular among teens and college students in the US. I’ve seen students smoking hookah on my college campus myself. For those that don’t have a hookah of their own, there are hookah lounges.

Another bad thing about smoking hookah is that it’s usually a group activity, and many people put their mouth on the same mouth piece. That is kind of gross and potentially dangerous to your health. (Imagine if someone you were smoking with had an oral infection.) Some hookah lounges do provide plastic mouth pieces, but unfortunately this isn’t true of all lounges. People that own a hookah may not have extra mouth pieces either. This can make hookah smoking a pretty un-clean activity. So as pretty as these water pipes look, there’s more to them that meets the eye, and they are definitely more harmful than you might have thought.

-Erica