Do Vapes Help You Quit Smoking Better Than Heated Tobacco?

In early 2025, tobacco advertising began to prominently appear in shops in the UK for the first time in two decades. It caused exactly the amount of controversy one might expect during a time when vape kits are part of the vanguard of ensuring a smoke-free Britain.

The adverts in question were for heated tobacco products, prominently displayed in supermarkets and easily visible to anyone walking in, including children.

Whilst the immediate response of many health experts and people who remember the effect cigarette advertising had was abject horror, the two supermarkets at the centre of the controversy have defended showing the tobacco adverts through a loophole that appears somewhat dubious.

According to the BBC, the loophole claimed by Morrisons, Japan Tobacco International (makers of Mild Seven and Hamlet) and Sainsbury’s is that they can legally display adverts because the product on sale is heated tobacco rather than cigarettes, cigars or loose-leaf tobacco.

The claim is that heated tobacco is not a tobacco product, which would be illegal to advertise under a 2002 law, because it is not made to be sniffed, sucked, chewed or smoked. Even though it uses heated tobacco to deliver nicotine, because it is not heated enough to create smoke it is, according to the tobacco companies and supermarkets, not a tobacco product.

This is not a view that has been widely adopted; Asda and Tesco do not run tobacco adverts, and Kate Pike, the lead officer for tobacco at the Chartered Trading Standards Office, claims that they are prohibited and described the brazen advertising as “taking the mick”.

The argument of JTI, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Philip Morris International is that there is no rule that says heated tobacco cannot be marketed, so therefore it must be legal.

This will likely be banned under new legislation before their argument can be tested in court, but it has led to discussions about heated tobacco more broadly as an alternative to smoking and vaping.

This ignores the fact that the harms of tobacco are not just found when it burns.

Vaping Vs Heated Tobacco

Heated tobacco, also known as heat not burn to drive home the point that it is not technically smoking, works by heating tobacco to a high temperature using an electrical device to create a nicotine vapour that is inhaled. 

In some technical aspects, this is similar to how certain types of e-cigarettes work, but the fundamental difference is what is being heated.

Whilst a vape will heat either nicotine salts or a vape juice which may or may not have nicotine added to it, a heated tobacco device heats up tobacco leaf in sticks but fundamentally the same stuff that is found in rolling tobacco and cigarettes.

This means that the harmful chemicals and substances that are found in other tobacco products will be found in heated tobacco vapour. 

The evidence for the safety of heated tobacco is somewhat unclear, given that most of the evidence claiming that they are is funded by the tobacco companies themselves and thus is riddled with conflicts of interest, but even the evidence that does exist suggests that they are more harmful than e-cigarettes.

As well as this, because they actually contain tobacco and not just nicotine, they are not particularly useful for helping people to quit or an effective tool for harm reduction.

Vaping is effective for helping people quit smoking because you can reduce the amount of nicotine in the products you buy, which allows you to gradually reduce your dependence on nicotine with an eye to eventually quitting.

This is impossible with heated tobacco because it will always contain nicotine by design.

They are not particularly popular in the UK, which might explain the aggressive marketing strategies to try and reclaim the lost cigarette smokers who have stopped through a product that possesses some similar harms.

There are some places where heated tobacco is a popular alternative to smoking, but that is typically only in places where nicotine vapes are not allowed to be sold.

A good example of that is JTI’s home country of Japan, which made vape juices containing nicotine illegal, leading smokers to switch to heated tobacco as the alternative instead.

It does provide some encouragement about the approach taken by the NHS to support the use of e-cigarettes to help people quit smoking, as the evidence base showing vaping can help people quit is significant.

At present, there are some concerns regarding mixed messaging, but when it comes to tobacco, the harms are very clear.