Cooking Fuel, Household Air and the Exposure Gradient Inside the Home

Household air pollution cannot be understood from a single fuel label. Cooking practices, ventilation, fuel stacking and background pollution change what people actually breathe. Cleaner fuels were associated with substantially lower particulate exposure than solid fuels, but exposure did not disappear and households using the same nominal fuel still varied widely. Energy transitions need to be evaluated through real exposure reduction and sustained household use, not simply a binary clean-versus-solid-fuel category.