Researchers used electric stoves to treat asthma. It worked.
The latest evidence that gas is bad for your health.
There’s already lots of research showing that gas stoves fill our homes with nasty air pollution, including cancer-causing chemicals and toxins that increase the risk of kids getting asthma.
Still, a study published this month blew my mind.
Led by Dr. Ash Sehgal, a professor at Case Western’s School of Medicine, researchers recruited families from across the Cleveland and Akron areas where at least one person had asthma. Using funds from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, they replaced gas stoves with electric induction stoves in 91 homes.
And then they did something unprecedented: They studied whether people got less sick after they stopped cooking with gas. It was the first time time scientists had replaced gas ranges with electric ranges and examined the health impacts.
For 72 homes where at least one resident suffered from “poorly controlled asthma,” the team measured health outcomes before and after the gas-to-electric switch: How often were participants awoken by asthma at night? How much time did they spend wheezing? How much shortness of breath did they experience? Did they need to visit the emergency room? Did they have to stay home from work or school?
Lo and behold: Across every health metric studied, people got better. Not just better, actually — dramatically better.
“Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” Sehgal told me.
Let that sink in: twice as much improvement as with medical treatments of asthma.
We’ll get to the caveats, the climate policy implications and the Gavin Newsom of it all.
But first a frustrating fact: As amazing as the study was, it could have been even more amazing if the Trump administration hadn’t killed most of the funding.