Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

My son has eczema and food allergies and I did a lot of research on actions we could take to help prevent the so called "atopic march" to hay fever and asthma. There's a lot of woo-woo stuff out there that I think can be safely ignored, but I did find what I consider strong evidence that families that hand wash their dishes have significantly lower incidence of some allergic symptoms. I thought it sounded weird and I didn't know what the mechanism could be but the evidence looked so strong that we stopped using our dishwasher. I guess this is one potential mechanism.

Gas stoves and ovens are the other thing we stopped using, with good justification I think.

View on HN

>There's a lot of woo-woo stuff out there that I think can be safely ignored, but I did find what I consider strong evidence that families that hand wash their dishes have significantly lower incidence of some allergic symptoms.

Yes, I believe there are studies that have found households that use detergents to wash their dishes have significantly high rates of allergies than households that only hand wash dishes. After hearing that, I started trying to try to avoid using detergent when possible. I think it makes a lot of sense-- really the majority of the powerful chemical detergents we use in the home are mostly unnecessary. They're just bound to leave residue that enters our bodies

So, pragmatically, we can’t not use our dishwasher - time is just not available given some other constraints. Given that, do you have any suggestions from your reading about less harmful detergent replacements?

Another comment suggested an extra rinse cycle.

can you explain more on the gas stoves and oven part?

Children living in houses with gas stoves have somewhere between 20% and 50% more asthma. https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/42/6/1724/737113?login=...

They put a really high amount of particulates in the air, drastically reducing air quality.

The particulate result is dubious from what I've seen

Most people keyed into this from the Vox article:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602...

Which links to:

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1172959

As evidence for the claim that Gas range put out more PM2.5

But if you consult table 3 of that article you will see it doesn't show that at all. The food (especially frying) swamps differences between electric vs gas ranges, which themselves aren't even significant.

When we lived in houses with gas, some difficult to remove yellow residue formed on the outsides of all our stainless steel. We assumed it was cooking oil, but apparently, it was not. Our induction range completely eliminated that problem.

I wonder how much of the gunk is still in my lungs.

The real kicker is that most gas stoves leak. That residue might not have even been from USING the stove - it could have been from a very slow leak constantly coming out of the stove.

I took apart mine and completely greased all the fittings and put the proper type of teflon tape. Feel way better. Confirmed there are zero leaks now

Nice!

Gas stoves exhaust right into the house. Besides raising the CO2 level, they produce CO, carbon monoxide, and smoke from whatever impurities come with the gas, that vary according to where it comes from. I doubt anybody bothers to get the radon out. That would cost money.

Propane is probably purer than straight-up NG, but it's exhaust is still exhaust.

radon decays into dust in a couple of days, but natural gas deposits are tens of millions of years old and have been out of touch with potential radon-generating rocks for weeks or months by the time they reach your stove burner

getting radon out does not cost money

In a week or three, anyway. Anywhere somebody has bothered to liquify the NG, the radon will have decayed before it gets vaporized again. Where pipelines lead straight to gas wells, the dwell time in the pipeline before it is burnt could be quite short. But there might be negligible radon even at the wellhead, as it would need to be picked up from surrounding rock on the way out, unlike e.g. helium which accumulates.

Probably other toxins are more important: mercury vapor and hydrogen sulfide are usually mentioned. Hydrocarbons other than methane may burn to carbon monoxide or soot. Gas is said to get much less processing before delivery than it used to.

SpaceX will probably purify theirs before pumping it aboard, just to increase the useful life of their Raptor engines.

good points

>Gas stoves exhaust right into the house

Best case you have a hood that vents to the outside. Hoods really work

Restaurants commonly have such hoods. I don't know of any private homes that do, though I don't doubt a few exist.

Most homeowners don’t think about it. If your range is located on an exterior wall it’s easy. Ought to be more common

My home as a kid did. I don't know why it's fallen out of favor, since I can't imagine it costing more than $100 or so in parts and labor on a build... If we can have a bathroom vent, why not a cooking vent?

If the vent moves more than a certain amount of CFM air, then an exchange system is required, but that takes almost a restaurant grade vent to get to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com