Is smoking hookah bad for you?

Spend an hour smoking hookah, and you might as well have smoked a pack of cigarettes. That’s how much tar and nicotine you’ll be exposed to. “If you examine the stuff they’re inhaling, it’s potent – it’s a lot of bad stuff,” says Norman H. Edelman, senior medical adviser for the American Lung Association. read more

Hookah smoking is not safer than cigarette smoking. Also known as a narghile, shisha or goza, a hookah is a water pipe with a smoke chamber, a bowl, a pipe and a hose. Specially made tobacco is heated, and the smoke passes through water and is then drawn through a rubber hose to a mouthpiece. read more

"It is ludicrous and anti-scientific to claim that hookah or shisha smoke is 200 times more toxic than cigarette smoke," he says. "While about 5,000 chemicals have been identified so far in cigarette smoke, chemists and pharmacologists from Saudi Arabia only found 142 chemicals in shisha smoke. read more