The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
Cooking fumes are the primary pollutant in my life, and honestly is one that I struggle with since I have severe asthma but love to cook. I do what I can, but this is something I wish was taken more seriously in society because there's a huge economic hill to climb to solve it yourself vs having to deal with what's available on market.
I suspect such a setup doesn't have to cost much. In return I enjoyed many years of cooking, summer and winter, without mostly without the odors & humidity.
I missed it as soon as I moved here ... although the vent is up-through-the-roof vertical, it's very ineffective ... and I can no longer cook most things I once took for granted.
It blew my mind seeing this as an Australian, where externally venting fans are standard.
but this is likely a very small factor for nearly all people. cars (oil) and electricity generation (coal and gas) create most of the harmful particulate matter in the air (and water and ground), so that's where we should focus our anti-pollution efforts first and foremost.
...or perhaps, it doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things, and you're worried about it because you bought a measurement device and started measuring something you hadn't measured before.
This isn't a minor point. It's a recurring theme in biological and medical science where researchers start to measure things for the first time, discover a previously unknown level, declare it significant or "alarming", and ignore that there's no causative link to any known harm.
When you measure things, you find things, but most things you find are uninteresting.
For what it's worth, the same particulate counter will also spike off the charts when anyone takes a shower, but as far as we can tell those salt pm's aren't dangerous.
PM2.5 particles are not all the same, nor are periodic exposure levels in a household kitchen in any way comparable to those used in a laboratory animal study.
> For what it's worth, the same particulate counter will also spike off the charts when anyone takes a shower, but as far as we can tell those salt pm's aren't dangerous.
Yes, exactly. You are perfectly illustrating my point. You have just as much evidence for this claim as for the kitchen one (i.e. none), but you assume one is fine and the other is not.
It's probably not a bad idea to open a window or run a vent (depends on where you live, I guess), but I wouldn't panic or deploy a particle meter, or stop cooking if I couldn't do it, either.