If you live somewhere with relatively clean outdoor air, it's quite possible that your own cooking gives you more particulate exposure than ambient air pollutio

If you live somewhere with relatively clean outdoor air, it's quite possible that your own cooking gives you more particulate exposure than ambient air pollution does. Just do the math: The average PM2.5 in New York is 12 μg/m3. As this post shows, cooking can easily spike levels above above 500 μg/m3. So if you're exposed to smoky at 12/500=2.4% of the time, that alone equals your ambient air pollution. That's around 35 minutes per day. If you have an air purifier, this is even more likely to be true true—it's much easier for an air purifier to deal with a slow steady leak of particles from outdoors than to deal with spikes.