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If you’ve been around the internet,
you may have noticed gas stoves ending up in the hot seat.
That’s because a bunch of studies have highlighted their links
to indoor air pollution and certain health issues.
That set off a debate among lawmakers about
whether or not to slap regulations on these stoves.
And it set a lot of us wondering if we need to rethink our relationships to
this appliance we might’ve never thought twice about.
The thing is, there is no easy answer.
But we’re going to take a look at what people are worried about…
and what you can do if you’re concerned.
Plus, we’ll see why the future might be cooking with magnets.
Now, people have been cooking over fire since, well, they worked out fire.
And while plenty of kitchens around the world have now gone electric,
many people still cook over a flame, using gas.
Gas stoves became popular in the U.S. in the early 1900s,
after they edged out traditional wood and coal stoves in many households.
Even after electric stoves started making their way
into homes a few decades later, gas stoves stayed popular.
Many people just liked them, in part because of how easy it is to
control the temperature, and decades of
successful ads from the gas industry certainly didn’t hurt.
Today, gas stoves are still used in over
40 million U.S. households, and in many professional kitchens.
But evidence has been piling up that these gas stoves are polluting our indoor air,
even when they’re not in use.
And that it might be affecting our health.
Now, the fact that burning a fossil fuel inside a kitchen affects
indoor air quality might sound like a no-brainer.
But in theory, the reaction that takes place when
natural gas breaks down is a pretty clean process.
See, natural gas is mostly methane.
When you light methane on fire, it combines with oxygen in the air to
produce water, carbon dioxide, and a bunch of heat.
None of these byproducts are toxic.
But, there are a few problems.
The first is, to get this nice tidy reaction, called complete combustion,
you need a bunch of factors to line up perfectly.
Like, you need the right temperature and the right amount of oxygen, and so on.
And these perfect conditions just don’t happen in the real world.
So, a small fraction of the gas doesn’t get burned
and just flows out of your stove and into your kitchen.
Plus, when a combustion reaction isn’t complete, it creates a bunch of nasty
byproducts, like carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and other compounds.
And in a small, unventilated kitchen, it only takes a few minutes
to build up a concentration of these gases that’s considered hazardous.
On top of all that, there’s the fact that natural gas isn’t just pure methane.
It also contains small amounts of other compounds.
Whether they’re burned or unburned, these can pollute the indoor air too.
So, combustion gets a little messy.
But that’s just what happens when a gas stove is on.
Natural gas also pollutes the air when you’re not using your stove.
That’s because there are often small leaks in
the pipes that carry natural gas to stoves.
Methane and other compounds in natural gas may leak out
into households this way, even when a stove is off.
Some of these are known to be harmful to humans,
such as benzene and formaldehyde, which can cause cancer.
And in one study that sampled houses in Massachusetts,
the vast majority had compounds from natural gas floating around in the air.
Now, that doesn’t mean all these compounds were making people sick.
As with a lot of things, the dose makes the poison.
But overall, the idea of dangerous chemicals
floating around the vast majority of homes sounds not great.
And unsurprisingly, research suggests that this pollution
is tied to some health issues.
The biggest concerns these days have to do with the links
between gas stoves and childhood asthma.
Multiple studies have shown that kids who live in homes
with gas stoves are more likely to develop asthma.
Now, these studies haven’t yet proven that gas stoves cause asthma,
because most of them are based on surveys, not experiments.
Surveys can show correlations, but they can’t prove
that one thing causes another.
Still, it’s not exactly surprising to see a link
between gas stoves and respiratory conditions.
Some of the main byproducts of burning natural gas are compounds
made of nitrogen and oxygen, known as nitrogen oxides,
and these are known to irritate the respiratory system.
They make airways constrict and can cause shortness of breath or coughing,
even in low concentrations.
Fortunately, the levels of nitrogen oxides produced by stoves
don’t seem to be a big problem for most adults, even those with asthma.
But children can be especially vulnerable because they have smaller airways
and are generally closer to the ground,
where there are higher levels of these compounds.
And sure enough, research has found that among kids with asthma,
those exposed to higher levels of nitrogen oxides wheeze
more often and need to use an inhaler more than kids with less exposure.
Another study found that 13% of cases of kids
with asthma in the U.S. may be linked with the use of gas stoves.
So that’s been the biggest cause for concern.
But gas stoves may also have health impacts that are harder to suss out,
or that just haven’t been studied yet.
That leaves many of us trying to decide what to do with all of this information.
It’s tricky, especially because the reality is, our lives are full of pollutants.
They come from our couches, our floors, our cleaning products,
our heating systems… the list goes on.
And that’s just the pollution we encounter indoors.
So it’s not realistic to try to completely eliminate pollutants from our lives.
And fortunately, many are tolerable in small amounts.
But even though we can’t avoid them completely,
it helps to reduce risks wherever we can.
And the good news is, there’s more than one way to do that.
For many gas stove users, throwing out an expensive,
working appliance is just not in the cards.
Plus, if you don’t own your home, you usually
don’t have a choice what you cook on.
Fortunately, if you have a vent over your stovetop,
just turning that on can go a long way.
One study found that in households with gas stoves,
children were less likely to have asthma if the stove was used with ventilation,
compared to if there was no ventilation.
Children in these households also had better lung function overall.
Now, some vent systems are better than others,
and none can completely counteract the risk posed by gas stoves.
But the bottom line is, the more you can swap out old air and keep fumes from
building up, the better…
even if the best you can do is open some windows.
On the other hand, if you are eyeing alternatives to gas stoves,
you have a few options.
If you’re committed to the experience of cooking over a flame,
one way to do that more cleanly might be with propane.
You might associate propane with the cylinders that you connect to a grill,
but propane tanks can also be used for indoor cooking.
Like natural gas, propane is a fossil fuel.
It gets extracted from raw natural gas and petroleum.
But propane is much more pure than natural gas.
Whereas the methane in natural gas is mixed with a bunch of other compounds,
propane fuel still has impurities, but it’s mostly just… propane.
So it has a little less of the extra byproducts that come from
burning other compounds or failing to burn them completely.
That said, even though some experts think it’s an improvement over natural gas,
we couldn’t find any research that clearly shows
how much burning propane reduces health risks compared to natural gas.
Now, no method of cooking indoors is going to be pristine.
Cooking always releases some particles and compounds
into the air that aren’t great for the lungs.
But if you can avoid burning gas, you can at least
avoid adding nitrogen oxides to your indoor air.
That could be big, especially if you have little ones in your home.
One way to quit burning gas is to go with a trusty old electric stove.
And yeah, electric coils take a little longer to get going and you can’t
adjust the heat as fast, but they get the job done.
There’s a reason they’ve been around for a hundred years.
You don’t have to stick with the old-school electric stove, though.
There’s a newer cooking technology that still runs on electricity but
gives the electric stove a complete makeover.
It’s called an induction stove.
And it works thanks to some pretty awesome physics.
What happens is this: You have an alternating electric current running through
some copper coils underneath the cooktop.
That’s just a current that changes direction periodically,
just like the current that flows from an outlet.
That generates a magnetic field.
And as the current changes direction, the magnetic field does too.
Then comes some physics magic.
If you place a material that conducts electricity inside a flip-flopping magnetic field,
you’ll generate a current in that material.
This is called induction.
But the material itself resists the flow of current,
and that resistance creates heat.
So you essentially turn the pot itself into the heat source.
The surface of the stove doesn’t even get hot.
Only the pot does!
The one catch is it only works with specific materials,
like stainless steel and cast iron, so you might need some new pots and pans.
But there’s no fuel-burning involved,
so it’s a good option for keeping indoor air clean.
As a perk, induction stoves are also more efficient than cooking with gas,
and they’re easier to control than traditional electric stoves.
They can even heat food and water faster than other stoves.
For now, they’re still only used in a fraction of households in the U.S.
That’s partly because they tend to be more expensive than other stoves,
and if you don’t have an electrical outlet ready to go,
you might need an electrician to get you set up.
So switching stoves isn’t necessarily hassle-free.
But induction stoves are getting more popular,
and they offer a promising way to clean up our indoor air.
The point of all this isn’t to remove every possible pollutant,
but taking any steps to keep that air fresh may help your health.
And the solutions won’t look the same for everyone.
Your own decision might come down to cost
or the ages of people in your household.
Maybe all you can do for now is open a window while you cook.
Either way, here in the U.S., many of us spend
the vast majority of our lives inside our homes.
So, it can be worth it to think about what else is in that home,
and how it could be affecting the air we breathe.
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