Danger of natural gas
Kristy Dyer – Jun 16, 2026 / 11:00 am | Story: 619872
Photo: N.Bruce/WHO
A woman and her baby are exposed to high levels of household air pollution during cooking with a traditional open fire in Guatemala.
A woman gets up early in the morning and walks through the dawn gathering wood, charcoal or animal dung.
She returns to her home and starts cooking, an all-day event, over a “three rock stove” —three rocks with a fire in the middle and a pot or griddle balanced on the rocks.
The stove is inside the house and smoke fills the room. She keeps her infant on her back and small children within reach, also breathing the smoke.
The International Energy Agency estimates 40% of the world’s population cooks over a rudimentary stove. The World Health Organization estimates there are 3.8 million deaths a year from inhaling chemicals and particulates from stoves in developing countries. Those illnesses and deaths are predominantly women and girls, tasked with cooking.
You might imagine inhaling cooking fumes is a developing world problem, not relevant to North America. Strangely, we are not immune from cooking-related lung problems.
Let me break that down into three categories—chef business, natural gas combustion and natural gas
leakage. If you flambé, sear, broil or fry in your kitchen, please invite me over for dinner. The Maillard reaction makes the food delicious but it can produce deadly chemicals, not to mention the particulates that set off your smoke detector.
If you have a natural gas stove (or other natural gas appliances), combusting natural gas creates nitrogen oxide. Nitrogen oxide causes inflammation of the airways, reduced lung function and worsening asthma.
Nitrogen oxide is emitted when natural gas appliances work as they were intended. But there is a lot more natural gas escaping into the air in your home than you might expect. Natural gas fittings in the walls can leak. Natural gas appliances can leak gas at a low level even when they are off and even when you can see the flame, not all the gas is consumed.
Several careful studies have found correlations between natural gas stoves and children with asthma. There has been controversy over these studies because, while the correlation between asthma and natural gas stoves is strong and shows up in repeated studies, establishing formal scientific proof that natural gas causes asthma can be tricky.
Ethically, any studies on children must be minimally harmful (which asthma isn’t) and have the possibility of providing benefit to the child in the study (the fact that it might save other children isn’t good enough).
The “CHILD” study, done by UBC in 2023, looked at 3,000 households in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Toronto. The study found that having a natural gas stove is correlated with twice the incidence of asthma in children under the age of five.
The studies director, Michael Brauer, a professor of public health and respiratory medicine, recommends everyone should replace gas stoves with electric, especially if anyone in the house has asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Want to test that in your own home? Wirecutter recommends using a carbon dioxide monitor.
The list of stuff that’s bad for your lungs is long—smoke, methane, HCAs, PAHs, VOCs and would require thousands of dollars in specialized detection equipment (which would also takeup most of your kitchen). A carbon dioxide monitor is a pretty good stand-in. If the carbon dioxide goes up, those other irritants are probably also present. Some monitors communicate with your phone, so you can set an alarm or check what happened overnight when your gas furnace turned on.
Don’t buy an air purifier. Even the most expensive ones won’t work on most of those chemicals.
If you are going to keep your gas stove, the first step should be to use an effective range hood. Unfortunately gas stoves don’t require range hoods vented to the outside, although all other gas appliances do require outdoor venting. “Ductless” or “recirculating” range hoods (often a microwave combo) have no effect on most of the bad stuff.
Cooking on the back burner, opening a window and turning on the bath fan. For less than $100, you can purchase a countertop induction burner, which will work with any pot that sticks to a magnet.
And what about the 40% of women in the world who cook indoors over an open flame? Many charities are trying to tackle the problem that those women face.
But an aid worker, introducing solar stoves in India and who was interviewed by the New York Times, said getting villagers to bake roti in a solar cooker was like telling an Italian risotto tastes just as good if it’s made in a microwave.
We are still working on that issue.
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
