Gas Stoves and Asthma

By Sammy Roth, July 2026

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.

The study, published this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, which announced in fall 2024 — shortly before Donald Trump won reelection over Joe Biden — that it would award more than $17 million for the project. Cleveland’s MetroHealth System would work with community organizations to identify 1,200 homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods where at least one person had asthma, and pay the full cost to buy and install induction stoves — a good deed if I’ve ever heard one.

But in May 2025, federal officials terminated the grant; about $2 million ultimately came through, Sehgal told me. Just 91 families received electric stoves and ovens.

“We used our own funds to finish up the project,” Sehgal said.

With a much smaller sample size, he and his coauthors weren’t expecting especially robust results. But it turns out removing lung-irritating fumes from your house — particularly nitrogen dioxide, or NO2 — is very good for your body.

Before and after the stove switch, 85 study participants with poorly controlled asthma took a standard survey with questions such as, “In general, during the past week, how limited were you in your activities because of your asthma?” Beforehand, their average score was 2.6, indicating moderate symptoms. Afterward, their average score was down to 1.5, indicating mild symptoms.

That’s a 1.1-point improvement. By comparison, medical treatments of asthma typically improve scores between 0.4 and 0.6 points.

Emergency room or hospital visits for asthma also declined dramatically after the stove switch, as did missed work or school days.

“Even with just the 85 people that we had, we were able to show a huge improvement,” Sehgal said. “We were very surprised at how large the improvement was. The fact that it was so large was why we were able to conclude that the stove change was beneficial, despite the fact that the grant was terminated.”

Sehgal emphasized that his team’s results “shouldn’t be considered definitive” and that more research is needed to build on their work. There was no control group that didn’t switch to electric ranges, and it’s possible other factors could have accounted for some of the health improvements, such as seasonal environmental changes or medical treatments the scientists didn’t track. Bigger, better-funded studies with a wider range of participants are logical next steps.

“Changing the stove is not going to cure asthma,” Sehgal added. “Folks should still work with their physicians, take their medications.”

Still, he described the results as groundbreaking.

“They were both statistically significant and clinically important,” he said.

The big-picture context is that gas isn’t just bad for our lungs: It’s one of the main causes of climate change, and a hotly contested battleground in America’s cultural and political landscapes.

After years of pledging to transition from fossil fuels to climate-friendly power sources like solar and wind, Democratic governors from California to New York to Hawaiʻi are now taking a softer approach to gas, at times insisting the fuel is still needed — potentially in much larger amounts than previously expected — to avoid power outages and keep energy prices from rising. They’ve been egged on by the gas industry, whose right-wing allies have stoked fears about liberal politicians causing blackouts and taking away gas stoves.

The American Gas Association, a trade group for gas utilities, didn’t respond to my request for comment about the new study. But the group has long dismissed concerns about the health risks from gas stoves — despite the industry having known about those risks since the 1970s.

It’s not hard to figure out why gas companies want to bury the truth.

Last year, Colorado passed a law requiring newly sold gas stoves to come with health warning labels. A similar bill passed the New York Legislature last month and is awaiting Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature. Health warning bills for gas stoves have also been introduced in Illinois and Massachusetts.

Naturally, the gas industry is fighting back — at times successfully.

Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made California the first state to require health warning labels on newly sold gas ranges, after SoCalGas and industry groups lobbied against it. Colorado’s law, meanwhile, is currently on hold due to a lawsuit filed by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.

There’s also a legal battle in Washington, D.C., where an advocacy group is suing appliance manufacturer Haier, arguing that its failure to warn consumers about the health risks of its gas stoves violates D.C.’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act.

“This fight over the science of gas stove pollution has entered the courtroom,” said Brady Seals, who runs the Electrification for Health program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “At the heart of a lot of these lawsuits is trying to cast doubt on the health science.”

Seals described the new study as “just more evidence” that gas stove pollution makes asthma worse — exactly the kind of evidence the gas industry wants to avoid.

“This is very timely and relevant given the fight over science which has come to the courthouse,” she told me.

Seals was grateful for Sehgal’s work, but perhaps not quite as surprised by the results.

“Asthma is now the No. 1 chronic disease in kids,” she said. “Our previous study found that 12.7% of childhood asthma could be attributed to gas stove use — and 12.7% doesn’t sound like much, but that’s about the same risk profile as a kid who lives with a smoker. And for many of us, we recognize that exposure to secondhand smoke is a health risk.”

The broader conversation about gas — its climate impacts relative to coal, its costs and benefits compared with renewables and batteries — is going to continue for a long time. Nobody is shutting off every gas-fired power plant tomorrow, or showing up at your house to tear out your gas range without your permission.

But the more people who have the opportunity to go electric, the better. The sooner we elect a federal government that funds basic research — and dishes out incentives for induction stoves and electric heat pumps — the better.

Blue states should get cooking, too. Democrats can walk the affordability walk and chew the climate/clean air gum at the same time.

Induction stoves are more expensive than gas — there’s no getting around it. But if you factor in the asthma attacks, and the premature deaths, and the extreme weather from climate change, the math gets complicated, fast. We have to stop pretending gas stoves are harmless because it’s more convenient.

One hopeful data point: Study participants liked cooking with electricity more than they liked cooking with gas. Stove satisfaction scores improved from an average of 52.3 points out of 100 before the switch to 94.9 out of 100 afterward.

“There were some people who participated in the study because they really wanted to see if it would help their asthma, but they didn’t really want to change their stove,” Sehgal said. “They were pleasantly surprised that they liked the new stove.”