If you haven’t vaped a yogurt flavor from your local eLiquid manufacture, you may just want to take a second look at the formulation of these products. Butyric acid is the common ingredient in these yogurt flavor, the major constituent imparting the rancid and creamy flavor of cultured yogurt. Cool chemistry to think about! And to-date, no journalistic evidence exists proving the butyric acid chemical to be harmful by inhalation by itself.
“BY ITSELF” being the operative words here. Recent rummaging around the interwebs and speaking with an old UCSD professor of mine has yielded an astounding piece of literature –
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18940962
TL;dr (science stuffs) = Butyric Acid is a modulator of diacetyl reductase, the emzyme that breaks down diketones of many forms (think diacetyl, acetion, acetyl propionyl, etc…). If butyric acid is present in solution, it will downregulate the activity of diacetyl reductase, effectively allowing the diketones to remain in your body for longer periods of time, leaving them to their naughty business for longer periods of time (not good).
Conclusion – Butyric acid in eLiquids should be safe for inhalation based upon the current literature, however its presence should be accompanied by NO DIKETONE CONTENT WHATSOEVER. This presents an increased health-risk if they are indeed present in solution.
As a result, we are adding butyric acid as our newest analyte-of-interest to the Nude Nicotine library of compounds to detect for. Our qualifications will be a requirement of non-detectable results for all 3 major diketones if the presence of butyric acid is positive.
Interested to hear what you all have to comment on the issue! Post up here, give us a ring, send a PM, email, or a wupf (copyright Ryan from the office).
Vape safe friends! Best regards, Jake CEO, lead chemist – Nude Nicotine admin@nudenicotine.com (858) 216-2044
Sounds good, but I want to know how you plan to test at the ppb level. Remember NIOSH recommends 5 ppb for DA.
This is great great info. Kind of worrying, think about all the recipes that call for a v1 and a v2 of an ingredient.
I agree that some of this information is worrying, however, how long have people been vaping these juices containing high levels of DA/AP/BA? After all these years of vaping DA/AP I would think that at least a few vapers would have been diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans. I could be wrong and I'm certainly not a good source of info on the topic, but I am not overly worried about the diketones for this reason.
> I could be wrong and I'm certainly not a good source of info on the topic
I mean this in the most respectful way possible, but why bother to comment in this manner if your opinion is essentially useless, and potentially swaying people to ignore these health concerns?
We need to have a list of concentrates that contain Butyric acid. Someone should compile a list of concentrates regarding what "bad" ingredients they have. Next step is to have juice companies label this on the bottle. Example: Contains: butyric acid, diacetyl, etc.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i2ZCPg7azxxNoVnwqwYocy6zLv34he0WU7xMExcGkBs/edit?pli=1#gid=0
Something like this?
It's only TFA and is a bit outdated, but it was a launching point for me 6-8 months ago on this topic.
For fuck sakes. I've always wondered if Butryic Acid was actually worse for us, because of the warning on TPA's site: > There are companies who are now using it more in place of Acetoin and Acetyl Propionyl, but in reality Butyric Acid can also be irritating when inhaled.
A popular yogurt base here is 4% Sweet Cream (TPA), and 3% Vanilla Swirl (TPA).
Is Butyrate <ethyl-> (105-54-4) also problematic?
Vanilla Swirl contains < 1% Butyrate <ethyl->. http://shop.perfumersapprentice.com/componentlist.aspx?sku_search=345029
This is academic at this point, because Sweet Cream has both < 1% Butyric acid AND < % 1% Acetoin, which has Diactyl as a byproduct. http://shop.perfumersapprentice.com/componentlist.aspx?sku_search=340029
So basically we should never use Sweet Cream?
I can't believe how fucked this whole scenario is. There are zealots running around here saying ZOMG DIKETONES despite the fact that cigarettes have 100x more Diactyle. The recent thing about coffee roasters makes me worry even less about Diactyle, since people have been roasting coffee for centuries and this is the first time anyone has ever noticed there is Diactyle in the air during the whole process. Now when in combination with some other "modulator," I can see how things could get much worse in a hurry.
At the end of the day, we simply have no idea. However, I think we can all agree that /u/JustSayNoToDiacetyl should rename himself to JustSayNoToButyricAcid.
I think the point of fact is that vaping is not completely safe. Vaping is harm reduction compared with smoking cigarettes.
Anyone who vapes should take into consideration the associated risks that come along with it. I know for myself I would rather subject myself to diketones and the possible small health risks from it then to endure the inevitable long term effects of cigarette smoke.
This is what I am thinking as well.
We should all know vaping isn't risk free. And the fact that the amount of chemicals (regardless of which one specifically) we are inhaling is 99% reduced then why are people freaking out.
I think it is absurd how much backlash and scrutiny these juice companies are receiving for having diacetyl and AP in their recipes.
If people are really worried about a infinitely smaller risk as opposed to cigarettes than maybe you should they should only breath filtered air and never go outside.
A little perspective from the sycophants would be nice.
Jake, are you guys testing your on house flavors only or actually providing a testing service?
testing service to the public as well! didn't want to turn this into an advertisement, but since you asked :) -
http://www.nudenicotine.com/gcms-testing/
I may have to take you guys up on that. My current products have their share of v1 custard... I'd be interested to see how bad, and would also love to know how low I can get them if I go free.
Still not sure there's a real health risk with them, tbh. To me the fact that the popcorn lung studies were all for the powdered form seems hugely significant.
Dude, you're my new best friend. I love a little bit of tobacco (in very small amounts) from my experience in native american and south american ceremonies, but was never a smoker. I love the tiny little nic bump I get. I use 1.5 now and vape instead of tobacco use (I was using Mapacho). But I am concerned with the heath effects of flavor additives. Your attention to detail is really promising for people like me who don't use vaping as a smoking cessation tool but as a relaxation and nootropic method.
Besides doing testing, is there any other way I could find out if a certain product contains these ingredients? Have flavor companies been cooperative in letting people know about these chemicals?
Some have, some lie through their teeth and then claim they "didn't know."
It doesn't really matter, because the end product has to be tested for the results to be valid to end users, and I've yet to see a lab that can test in the parts per billion range.
Which if you want to get really technical isn't even a good enough resolution, you'd need to get down to thousandth parts per billion to be able to make any kind of safety assumption based on NIOSH safety recommendations (for an industrial environment even, not for vaping) for the molecules that vapers are concerned with.
And even then, until we have hard data about these chemicals' health effects (if any) in vaping, we're just swinging blindly.
This is where the FDA should be focusing its research were they actually interested in protecting consumers. They're not, they're after protecting money from the Tobacco MSA, which is why they are trying to force out everyone who is not big tobacco from the vaping industry.
Thanks for being so thorough! I'm considering giving the major vendors a call and recording it, even the ones we know to contain those compounds, and post it here just so everyone can know who's being honest.
> (for an industrial environment even, not for vaping)
I'd argue that an industrial environment would be worse than vaping. In an industrial setting you're spending 8-12 hours a day, 5 days a week inhaling the air. Vape use varies greatly but I'm definitely not puffing away for 40+ hours a week.
One of my old lab mates was doing a reaction with butyric acid once. It literally smell like vomit - not to mention it stays on your skin all day (it goes through your gloves).
This was obviously way more than anyone here will ever encounter though.
I was just talking with a friend about this..
It is as /u/NudeNicotine Jake says it causes metabolic activity of the process of diactyl cycling through your body and clearing out to be slowed down/made less efficient through inhibiting reductase. This is only specific to Butyric Acid and they speculate it being a special interaction on the reductase.
I think while the obvious implication is please do not mix both, be careful in social settings about trying flavors and sharing flavors that are cream/cereal bases. They more than not have diketones, and you may run into a flavor you end up hitting that has BA on rotation and you run further into the situation of combining both. I really think flavor companies ought to take it upon themselves for full disclosure to the community about diketone content as well as potential BA content in their juice. Even having Acetoin in your juice will likely contain trace amount of Diactyl as acetoin is an intermediate and during production you may well have cross contamination of the two different compounds. Whatever we need to do some kind of seal Diketone free, acetoin free, Ba free is absolutely important as old research and new research provide information about drug interactions.
Butyric acid is not safe for inhalation based upon current literature, it is a known irritant and many medical safety professional advise caution in handling it. Even just glancing at wikipedia you see it can be highly irritating to skin contact, eye content, this is more than likely not limited to the lungs, nose, and other pathways it comes to contact with in our body in high concentrations as an inhaled vapor. At the very least if you are using diketones, derivatives, or related compounds exercise a bit of restraint on the concentration.
It likely isn't as bad as Diketones but no research currently suggests it should be safe, in fact any remotely relevant research suggests its not in anyway totally safe until we get pulmonary tests, cytotoxicity tests, and long term studies under the belt.
>diketones of many forms (think diacetyl, acetion, acetyl propionyl, etc…)
acetoin is not a diketone, it is very related in structure and is an intermediate in the production of diactyl though.
The best thing as a DIY juice/larger production vendors you can do is just keep it simple, do your research, and as you add more potentially dangerous compounds in of themselves and interacting ones try to be ethical about keeping risk to yourself and consumers you are sharing it with in perspective and do your part to educate and make people aware of health precautions to exercise.
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
- [/r/electronic_cigarette] [X-Post from DIY_eJuice] Nude Nicotine Analytics PSA - Critical Info: Butyric Acid Modulates Diketone Toxicity:
^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^(Info ^/ ^Contact)