What exactly are the substances contained in shisha tobacco?

Question

I was invited to a shisha-smoking party at a friend's place, and I tried it. It's got grape flavor in it when I inhaled. I didn't feel anything afterwards, but I'm just curious: what is exactly in the tobacco? How did they flavor it and is it as hazardous as smoking regular tobacco?

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia, shisha and hookah are synomomous, so I found a good article about hookah that should answer some questions.

"The most commonly-used hookah tobaccos (known as tobamel or maassel) are produced using a 1:2 mixture of shredded tobacco leaf mixed in with a sweetener such as honey, molasses or semi-dried fruit. Originally, tobacco was mixed with one of these sweeteners to form jurâk, a moist, flavorless tobacco. The fruit-flavored hookah tobaccos popular today got their start in the late 1980s when Egyptian tobacco companies began experimenting with flavored tobacco as a way to sell more of their products to women.

Contemporary manufacturers have begun to use glycerin as the primary sweetener in hookah tobaccos because of its humectant qualities and subtle sweetening properties that accentuate the various tobacco flavorings. Today, shisha tobacco is often mixed with dried fruit, natural extracts, and artificial flavorings to produce a varying assortment of tobacco flavors, including: apple, strawberry, rose, mango, cappuccino, vanilla, coconut, cherry, grape, banana, kiwifruit, blueberry, Arabian coffee, mixed fruit, watermelon, cantaloupe, cola, lemon, apricot, peach, white peach, licorice, orange, mint, and even bubblegum. This proliferation of flavors is rather new, starting perhaps in the mid-1990s."