Contrary to popular belief, a Middle-Eastern water pipe for smoking does not filter out toxins like heavy metals from tobacco smoke. The water in the pipe does not really filter the smoke and does not make smoking any less unsafe.
Tobacco leaves contain such heavy metals as copper, iron, chromium, bismuth, lead, vanadium, and uranium. They are one of the reasons that smoking causes diseases including head and neck cancers. The number of people who use a water pipe--called a hookah, argilah, or hubbly-bubbly--has risen worldwide in the past few years. To use them, people place tobacco into a bowl on the top of the pipe and light it. The smoke is passed through a container of water before it is inhaled.
Often, the tobacco used in a hookah is heavily flavored with sweeteners such as molasses or honey and other favors. According to the World Health Organization, a typical session of smoking using a hookah lasts up to an hour, during which a smoker inhales 100 to 200 times the amount of smoke inhaled from one cigarette. However, many people believe that filtering the smoke through water makes it less harmful than cigarettes.
Researchers at the German Jordanian University and the Royal Scientific Society in Amman, Jordan, conducted a study that tested smoke that had passed through a hookah. They tested samples of four types of tobacco commercially available in Jordan to determine the levels of 11 metals. They tested the compartments of the water pipe after a smoking session to see how much of the metals were left there, which would have meant that they were filtered out of the smoke.
They found that the hookah removed only 3% of the metals in the tobacco. In other words, the water did not filter out the metals.
"It can be concluded that this small fraction would not protect the user against exposure to the majority of the potentially toxic metals," the study stated.
The study was published in BMC Public Health and can be read online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/15/153.