"In the late 1960s, natural gas utilities launched "Operation Attack," a bold marketing campaign to bring lots more gas stoves into people's kitchens.
The gas utilities called Operation Attack their "most ambitious advertising and merchandising program ever." But as it got underway, concerns were becoming public about indoor pollution from gas stoves, including household levels of nitrogen dioxide.
Around the same time, Dr. Carl Shy, a federal public health researcher, was looking into the health effects of nitrogen dioxide. In 1970, Shy published a study showing that families exposed to greater levels of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide outdoors had higher rates of respiratory illness than families in less-polluted areas. The research caught the attention of the gas utility industry, and they asked Shy for a meeting.
When they met, Shy heard from the gas industry something Americans are now learning about, more than 50 years later: the potential health risks from cooking with gas stoves. "They are the ones who told me that the gas stoves produce nitrogen dioxide because of their high temperature," says Shy, now 91, at his home near Durham, N.C. "They said the hoods above gas stoves were really not powerful enough to pull out the nitrogen dioxide."
But in the following decades, the gas industry argued the opposite, asserting that range hoods could clear up this pollution. And it has contended that fumes from cooking food are more of a problem than the fossil fuel pollution of nitrogen dioxide."
Jeff Brady reports for NPR October 17, 2023.
Advertisement 
