Does cooking a Sunday roast really make the air inside your home ‘worse than Delhi’, as some reports have claimed recently? Can the simple act of making toast ‘release toxic particles into the air’?
The news, which came in the wake of studies from the University of Colorado in the US, certainly made alarming reading. Their researchers, announcing findings at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, claimed that they had unearthed surprising and disturbing evidence showing just how widespread air pollution in our homes really is. But how worried should we be?
COOKING TURKEY CAUSES THE SAME DAMAGE AS DRIVING A DIESEL CAR
We have known for a long time that air pollution on the streets, mainly from cars, trucks and burning coal, is extremely bad for our health.
According to the Royal College of Physicians, air pollution is responsible for the premature death of at least 40,000 Britons every year. It has also been linked to increased rates of mental illness and even childhood obesity.
Does cooking a Sunday roast really make the air inside your home ‘worse than Delhi’, as some reports have claimed recently? Can the simple act of making toast ‘release toxic particles into the air’?
Despite the fact that we spend much more of our time indoors than outdoors, not as much attention has been paid to what goes on inside our houses. So Colorado-based Professor Marina Vance decided to do some measuring. Last summer she and her team took over a specially built house in Texas.
For a month they did all the usual cooking and cleaning, while constantly monitoring air quality with special sensors. They were particularly interested in measuring levels of tiny particles called PM2.5, which are so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. They get their name from the fact that they are less than 2.5 micrometres – that is one 10,000th of a centimetre – across.
Recent widespread concern over pollution linked to vehicles with diesel engines is in part to do with how many of these PM2.5s they produce. The reason scientists worry about such tiny particles is that if they are inhaled, they can penetrate much deeper into our lungs than larger particles.
And once they get there, they cause inflammation and irritation. They can be absorbed into the blood and travel to the brain and other organs. Much to the scientists’ surprise, the simple act of roasting a turkey dramatically raised PM2.5 levels in the house. In fact, it was way above World Health Organisation guidelines for acceptable air quality – above the levels found on the streets of one of the most polluted cities on Earth, New Delhi in India.
Dr Vance and her team also found making toast raised particle levels ‘far higher than expected’.
As I mentioned earlier, we have known for some time
