Which is Worse, Shisha or Cigarette?

According to the French anti-tobacco agency (OFT), a report from the French national laboratory revealed that smoking shisha gives off as much carbon monoxide as 15 to 52 cigarettes and as much tar as 27 to 102 cigarettes. Bertrand Dautzenberg, OFT President said, "The report confirms that smoking shisha is a major source of air pollution in closed and covered areas. If comparing the data to regular cigarette smoke, one shisha corresponds to1 an average of around 70 drags on a cigarette."

The tests were conducted by Laboratoire National d'Essais (LNE) on three types of shisha: shisha with self-lighting carbon used in small amounts, self-lighting carbon used in large amounts, and natural carbon shisha used in small volumes. The laboratory used the three parameters that are measured when analyzing smoke on a packet of cigarettes: the amount of tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide.

For 70 liters (16 gallons) of smoke produced by the shisha, the small amount self lighting carbon tar results were measured at 319 milligrams, 32 times the legal European limit for a cigarette, while the large amount self-lighting carbon measured at 266 milligrams, 27 times the cigarette limit, and the natural carbon measured at 1,023 milligrams, a 102 times more than a cigarette.

Carbon monoxide measurements fared badly as well, as tests indicated that the carbon measurements from the three types of shisha came to 17 times the normal cigarette limit, 15 times, and 52 times the limit. The self-lighting carbon in both large and small amounts for nicotine measured about one cigarette per shisha, while the natural carbon was the nicotine equivalent of smoking six cigarettes.