Cooking and future risk of all-cause and cardiopulmonary mortality

Abstract

Cooking is practiced worldwide and is associated with multiple social, economic and environmental factors; thus, understanding cooking-related health effects would have broad public health implications. Here, we show that after an average 9.9 years of follow-up for 510,106 Chinese adults, always cooking with clean fuels was associated with lower risks of all-cause (0.90 [95% confidence interval 0.87-0.93]; P = 1.39 × 10^-9), cardiovascular (0.83 [0.78-0.87]; P = 6.83 × 10^-11) and respiratory (0.88 [0.79-0.99]; P = 0.026) mortality compared with non-cooking, of which 50.1% (14.5-85.6%) to 66.0% (38.5-85.8%) could be attributed to increased household physical activity. The mortality risks decreased with extended duration of cooking with clean fuels in dose-response manners, with the lowest hazard ratios of 0.74 (0.68-0.80; P = 1.20 × 10^-13) for all-cause and 0.62 (0.55-0.71; P = 3.15 × 10^-12) for cardiovascular mortality among never-smokers reported over 25 years of cooking. Our findings suggest lower future mortality risks may be gained only when cooking with clean fuels.