Chocolate ads lure teenagers to e-cigarettes

Researchers assigned 598 school children to one of three groups: one was shown adverts for candy-like flavoured e-cigarettes; a second group adverts for non-flavoured e-cigarettes; while a third saw no ads.

The study, released online Thursday in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, was comprised of a “systematic review and meta-analysis of 38 studies looking at the link between e-cigarette use and smoking cessation among smokers as young as 15 years old”.

The school children were then asked questions to gauge issues such as the appeal of using e-cigarettes and tobacco smoking (did the children think e-cigarettes or tobacco were “attractive”, “fun” or “cool”?), the perceived harm of smoking, how much they liked the ads and how interested they might be in buying and trying e-cigarettes.

Researchers found children exposed to advertisements showing candy-flavored e-cigarettes can be enticed into vaping and eventually tobacco smoking.

It is illegal to sell e-cigarettes and e-liquids to under-18s in the United Kingdom, but their use rose from 5% in 2013 to 8% in 2014, researchers from the university’s Behaviour and Health Research Unit said. Find us on Facebook too! Candy- and liqueur-flavoured tobacco products were heavily marketed to young people from the 1970s until 2009, when regulations were imposed.

She dismissed an industry challenge against forthcoming European Union regulations, which will including banning one in four of the strongest devices and putting health warnings on packaging telling people e-cigarettes contain a “highly addictive substance”.

The University of Cambridge study supported moves for greater regulation of advertising for e-cigarettes, including rules that adverts must not be likely to appeal to under-18s.

E-cigarettes have been introduced as a mean to cut down traditional smoking but a new research says that this strategy has backfired.

In 2014, e-cigarettes came to be used more commonly among youth than any other tobacco product, including cigarettes. “And there is no evidence that advertising has encouraged young people to take up regular vaping”, said Public Health England’s director for health and wellbeing Professor Kevin Fenton.

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