Beware Of Cooking Fumes

If you’re worried about cooking fumes – and research suggests you perhaps should be – an electric stove may be a better choice, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have found.

The research in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, showed that frying beefsteak on a gas stovetop instead of an electric stovetop resulted in increased exposure to chemicals such as napthalene and mutagenic aldehydes, which may be a risk factor in lung cancer.

Frying also increases exposure to ultrafine particles, which are more readily absorbed by the lungs. While exposure to these substances was “considerably higher” when cooking with gas compared to electricity, the researchers, Ann Kristin Sjaastad, Rikke Bramming Jørgensen and Kristin Svendsen, suggest that all “exposure to cooking fumes should be reduced as much as possible.”