Do you use any terps? Flavored isolate? @Nirvana_State
Yeah like 2% terps, they are harsh as hell so I will do a 2%, 4%, and 7% terp samples and make my wife blind taste test them. Some flavors take a little more to even be detectable but itās a very fine line between tasty and HARSH.
MCT has long been known to cause Lipid aspiration pneumonia:
"The appearance of the alveolar infiltrates shortly after the nasogastric administration of MCT oil in this infant with known GER suggests that the MCT oil was responsible for the unusual radiographic picture of aspiration pneumonia. "
I mean, we use PG because itās a good solvent for the flavors and nicotine and itās been studied for years. VG is used for the thicc clouds you speak of and no oneās putting PEG in vape juice except those trying to suspend cannabinoids into it.
And yea weāre sensitive to things that might injure people who inhale them because weāre the ones who get thrown under the bus by the lamestream media when THC vapes kill people.
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This is the only documented case of lipoid pneumonia from MCT oil that exists to date. A few key points:
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the subject of the study an infant with a severely weakened immune system that was surviving on feeding tubes.
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it was not administered the same way as we are discussing here. This was from MCT oil leaking directly from a tube that is used to transport nutrients to the stomach. This is very different than an aerosol containing just a few milligrams of MCT being administered intermittently. There are no known cases of lipoid pneumonia from vaping and as soon one is cited I will change my stance.
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A cartridge with 0.10ML of MCT and 90% cannabinoids spread out over hundreds of inhalationās is not comparable to a tube dispensing entire milliliters of oil directly into the lungs all at once.
Lipoid pneumonia is already an extremely rare complication but when it occurs itās almost exclusively in elderly patients using mineral oil based laxatives. What happens is they consume the liquid (picture a tincture) then fall asleep sitting up in a chair and it āgoes down the wrong pipeā into the lungs rather than the stomach. Mineral oil is a bigger culprit also because it consists of hundreds of heavy alkanes that you canāt absorb and would be very difficult to expel by coughing.
With that said, vaping MCT oil definitely still comes with risks. Lipoid pneumonia is far from the only concern we have inhaling foreign things. Pyrolysis studies is where we see the real scary stuff show up.
At normal vaping temperature ranges it does not produce anything too nasty but at above average temperatures (such as if you were smoking it or using a high voltage nicotine battery) it does break down into carcinogens (like most things at high temps). So you should not be just dumping it in freely but there is not anything at this time to suggest a 5-10% is going to do any more harm than any other alternative. Iāve had good results with it at this range countless times over the years and there really is not a good reason to use much more than that. If you use it you definitely canāt be making e-liquids with it and running it through a vape mod tank at crazy temperature either. Thatās still going to be dangerous.
In abnormally high concentrations like 30, 40, 50% MCT I would be worried about it interrupting the surfactants that line the membranes inside of your lungs. This is the other area of concern when inhaling things. In fairly negligible percentages like I mentioned this would be a very unlikely threat for MCT and the only study Iāve seen to date that suggested this may be dangerous for MCT tesred exposure for 2 hours (unabridged) which would again be an unrealistic comparison to a few droplets in cannabinoids over the course of days or weeks.
The surfactant model was largely concluded to be the reason Vitamin E acetate became so dangerous, not lipoid pneumonia (surprisingly). By disrupting the lungs natural surfactant system with ungodly amounts of a foreign oil, the surfactant layer breaks down and stops being able to control what stays and what leaves. The alveoli were no longer able to effectively āsqueeze outā and expel unwanted particles. This became a 1,2 punch for users vaping at higher temperature ranges too who were causing the VEA to breakdown into a toxic ketene gas, not to mention the other carcinogenic byproducts from the terpenes and other constituents that we normally are exposed to. The going theory is that the breakdown of this surfactant layer makes the lungs unable to protect itself from all of the other things that we expose it to while vaping that itās normally able to protect itself from.
If your oil is āthinā from that much MCT then that would make me more worried about this last issue with the surfactant layer. Using minors for CBD is the way to go and if anything a teeny tiny bit of TEC Temper has worked well for me.
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