Hookah. The first thing I think about when I hear that word is my mom’s reaction when I told her I tried it for the first time this past summer. Holy mom-ness! Both she and my dad couldn’t believe I would do such a thing, even when I was telling them I only did it once and that I don’t do it on a regular basis. The next day I get another phone call from my mom, but this time she decided to educate me on how awful hookah smoking is to my health. She started rattling off facts and figures she found on the internet. I didn’t know what to believe nor did I know what was true. I’ve heard hookah is better for you than cigarettes since the smoke is filtered through water. I’ve also heard hookah is a lot more pleasant to smoke since it’s flavored tobacco. Which is fact and which is fiction?

“In terms of the harmful impact of smoking [hookah], not much changes other than making it worse over cigarettes,” says Scott Young, the mental wellness graduate assistant at the Wellness Center located in the Thielen Student Health Center. “The health risks for smoking hookah are the same sorts of risks that one would have with smoking cigarettes. However, there tends to be more harm from smoking hookah than from smoking cigarettes.”

This surprises people the most. Even though the smoke is being filtered through water, the harmful particles are still there. The filtered smoke is smoother and cooled so it’s easier for you to inhale.

Since it’s easier to inhale, you take a longer breath of smoke.

Upon taking that breath, the hookah smoke is getting into your lungs ten times deeper than a drag on a cigarette.

Now, if you’re simply a “tag-along” to a hookah social and aren’t planning on smoking, I would suggest staying put at home. Research from the World Health Organization states that one hour of smoking hookah provides 100-200 times the amount of smoke that someone would spend on a single cigarette.

Just like every other tobacco product that produces smoke, you have to worry about second-hand smoke. If you’re that tag-along, you might as well bust out the pack of cigarettes, because if you sit in a room of hookah smoke for an hour, that’s equivalent to smoking three cigarettes.

If you change your mind and choose to participate in the water pipe smoking, you might as well smoke a cigarette every five minutes, because that’s the amount of smoke entering your lungs.

So what exactly does hookah smoke contain? I bet you can make an easy guess to the answer. “The same stuff that’s in cigarette smoke.” That’s absolutely true, but the comparisons aren’t necessarily the same.

According to research done at Virginia Commonwealth University, there is 36 times the amount of tar produced in a single hookah session than smoking a single cigarette. You’re also getting 1.7 times the amount of nicotine and 8.4 times the amount of carbon monoxide. So your lungs are going to turn darker, quicker with all that tar sticking to them.

Hookah is typically done to celebrate the culture of somebody else, but in every country outside the United States, hookah is smoked for less than fifteen minutes at a time. “It’s a cultural piece of their heritage but the way we use it is strictly American,” says Ray Rodriguez, the health promotion coordinator of prevention, education and outreach in the Wellness Center.

“In every culture that does it, it’s done for a shorter period of time than we find the average hookah bar, by far.”

The act of hookah smoking has evolved into something completely different from what it was when it originated in the Middle East. It’s interesting to find the number of people my age engaging in the Americanized version of hookah smoking. I only hope they realize what they’re doing to their bodies as well as distinguish the truths from the lies.

 — Emma Reed is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Alberton, Montana.