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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I am on the fence about research like this. On one hand, as an engineer by training it's hard for me to countenance the idea that any research (properly conducted) could be bad. On the other hand, people have been cooking indoors since time immemorial, and even things like toasters are more than a century old. If they were dangerous, we'd know by know. The risk is that such research gets oversold by the media into a panic, as we have seen time and again. Look at what "science" has done for nutrition in the last few decades--upset a bunch of traditional norms, without offering any meaningful advance. Are VOCs (for the most part, "smells") going to be the subject of the same circus as salt and fat?

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People in some countries have been cooking with indoor wood-fired stoves forever, yet we know for sure that these stoves are bad for respiratory health. That doesn't mean all the research is wrong!

I think the big take away is that you should pretty much always turn on the exhaust hood over your stove top when you cook. Doing so removes many of the particles generated by cooking.

For the same reason, the evidence is clear that indoor fireplaces are harmful to health ("It is at least as bad for you as cigarette smoke, and probably much worse."), yet most people refuse to accept implications of the findings.

* The Fireplace Delusion

https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/

But there is no connection to an actual outcome. Is this reducing my expected lifespan by a year? Two years? Or ten years? I might care about the latter, hard for me to get worked up about the former.

The fact that we’ve been doing this a long time means the effect couldn’t be all that large, or else we would’ve noticed something (e.g. a stark difference between those who cook at home and those who eat out).

I don't know why you're getting downvoted so much. People should be more concerned of sensationalism than VOCs for now. Stress kills far more people than this potentially broad category of compounds which could include harmless and vital smells. Is the media now going to try to sterilize our sense of smell as well as our sense of taste.

Ban salt, fat, (but not sugar, just tax it even more), flavour and smells! The hysteria over how to eat and what to eat has killed potentially hundreds of millions of people at this point. Sensationalism motivates culture and is absolutely to be feared.

Of course we shouldn't live in sealed up caves with no vents. We shouldn't live in moldy apartments either. Tell us something we don't know.

In most homes the "exhaust hood" doesn't vent to outside. It filters the big particles out and mixes the rest. I'm not sure if this is better or not, but the difference isn't much, and after a short time they are the same.

The big particles are not what is most dangerous. Range hoods that recirculate air are not helpful. All kitchens should have externally-exhausted vent hoods, and it's even more important when using gas ranges, since a lot of harmful combustion byproducts are also being created (NO2, CO, etc). Sadly as you point out, this is far less common than it should be.

In my experience [in the US, particularly the PNW] most single family homes vent outside, but it isn't uncommon for dinky apartments with retrofitted exhaust hoods to simply filter and recirculate.

science isn't easy. if we could just trust our intuitions there would be no point.

your sentiment reminds me of the surgeon mentality before germs were discovered. "ive been operating on people for years and saving their lives -- no way could i be giving them an illness just through my hands!", and yet that turned out to be true.

the low hanging fruit are gone but there is a lot left to explain in terms of health. for example millions of people die from many kinds of cancers every year for which we have no idea why.

Why would we "know by now"? If the symptoms aren't immediate and highly specific, couldn't it have gone for millennia unnoticed? Maybe this is the by now.

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