Does Cooking With Gas Stoves Hurt Indoor Air Quality?
Does cooking with gas affect indoor air quality? Of course it does — that is simply no longer a question. How much, is the better question.
Combusting methane (natural gas) creates byproducts. Like any other chemical reaction, when natural gas is lit on fire, it reacts with the air and produces new chemical compounds. These include carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and other nitrogen–oxygen combinations, often referred to cumulatively as the NOx’s, formaldehyde, and volatile organic compounds.
NO2 worsens respiratory conditions. This includes asthma, and recent research found that homes with gas stoves have a 12.7% greater chance of having children with asthma.
CO is a known killer, because it binds with greater affinity to our blood’s albumen than oxygen (O2) does (a random fact from my college biology class that has stuck with me to this day). The result is that less oxygen gets to your muscles. This is why, when someone smokes a cigarette, it can calm them down — it literally deprives muscles of oxygen, and the muscles are forced to be less active as a result. Healthy? No … but effective in the short run to calm people down because of this mechanism. CO causes headaches, vertigo, nausea, and, yes, death, if there’s enough to truly deprive your blood’s albumen of oxygen such that none reaches your brain.
VOCs are bad. Just. Bad. They come in a lot of shapes and sizes, but they are known to cause irritation and persistent problems with eyes, nose, and throat. And they are suspected to do a whole lot more.
A recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that 12.7% of current childhood asthma in the United States is attributable to gas stove use.
Wait. Did that set in? Read that again if not. It’s not just saying that homes with gas stoves have a higher incidence of childhood asthma, which, if you’re the natural gas industry, is easy to dismiss as correlation, not causation … as maybe a function of the homes and where they are, versus a literal cause and a literal effect. It’s much stronger than that — it is saying that 13 out of every 100 children in the US that have asthma have it because natural gas is used in their home’s stove.
PBS recently did an investigative look at natural gas stoves. Some key elements:
- Air quality devices used in the video show that NO2 levels hit 500 parts per billion (PPB), which is 5x the one-hour air standard set by the EPA for NOx, and 40x greater than WHO daily guidelines.
- The NOx gases do not stay in the kitchen — they spread throughout the whole house to levels that are higher than recommended by health agencies.
- 35% reductions were found after apartments switched from gas stoves to induction cookstoves.
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