The study looked at publicly available Google search data in Japan for heat-not-burn tobacco products between January 2015 and August 2017. Tobacco manufacturers have been aggressively marketing these products in Japan since 2014.To get more news about iqos, you can visit hitaste.net official website.

The surge in the consumption of heat-not-burn tobacco in Japan is, in part, because it imposes strict regulations on the sale of liquids that contain nicotine, commonly used in e-cigarettes. The nicotine-laced liquid is heated into a vapor and inhaled while smoking an e-cigarette.

On the other hand, a heat-not-burn tobacco product, is essentially a battery-powered device that heats leaf tobacco to approximately 500 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a smokeless aerosol inhaled through the mouth. Makers of heat-not-burn products claim these products are healthier than cigarettes and deliver the satisfaction of the "throat-hit," which is the pleasurable feeling many smokers seek. E-cigarettes don't provide that sensation.

The researchers found that in the last two years, the average number of search queries for heat-not-burn tobacco products by Internet users in Japan ranged between 6 and 7.5 million each month. The interest shown by internet users prior to 2015 was much less since there were almost no queries in Japan for heat-not-burn tobacco products, the researchers said.

The team, led by Theodore Caputi, currently a graduate student of public health at University College Cork in Ireland, compared these numbers to similar data on the rise of e-cigarettes in the United States in the last five years. They found that the spike in Google search queries for heat-not-burn tobacco products in Japan has been much more rapid than than those for e-cigarettes in the US, which they say could mean that the use of these devices will spread quickly in new markets, eclipsing the popularity of e-cigarettes.For smokers in Japan, the country's regulatory blueprint makes heat-not-burn tobacco a more commonplace substitute for cigarettes. And for tobacco giants, the regulatory landscape around e-cigarettes has made Japan the ideal testing ground for heat-not-burn tobacco devices.

Japan Tobacco, the world's third largest tobacco maker, launched Ploom Tech, an electronic tobacco heating stick, in the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka in March 2016. The following month, Philip Morris International released its IQOS (an acronym for "I quit ordinary smoking") in Japan. IQOS is a heating device that looks and feels like holding a conventional cigarette. At the end of 2016, British American Tobacco introduced its heat-not-burn product Glo into the Japanese market. None of these are available in the US yet, although in December Philip Morris applied to the FDA seeking approval for IQOS as a tobacco product with a "modified risk."