A new study and the largest to date of its kind has found no evidence to support the theory being floated by some that vaping is a gateway to youth smoking. Interestingly, as e-cig company Vaper Empire points out, the researchers behind the study set out to prove that vaping serves as a gateway to youth smoking, however, they essentially found the opposite to be true.

The study we’re talking about is the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, which is a national longitudinal analysis of tobacco use and its impacts on human health in the United States. As Vaper Empire pointed out in a blog post, the study could not report a single instance of a non-smoker, regular vape user who later became a regular smoker. And this is out of 12,000 participants, which is obviously quite a few.

Seems strange, right? Then again, who is really going from vaper to smoker and not the reverse? It’s 2019 right now and a lot of smokers have caught on to the reality that vaping is likely much less harmful than smoking, which is why many have already made the switch. Doing the reverse, going from vaping to smoking, just seems stupid and we imagine that’s what others are thinking as well. So the idea that vaping serves as a gateway to smoking, well, it just seems like nonsense to us.

You can read the full findings of the study here.