The study didn’t actually find anything related to cookware. Modern Teflon in the US doesn’t expose people to PFOA/PFOS like old version did due to new regulations. The chemicals could also be entering peoples body’s through drinking water or bioaccumulation in meat or plants.
You should throw away nonstick cookware from before 2013, but new nonstick cookware sold in the US does not have PFOA. I believe the EU followed suite recently.
Edit: After doing more research based on many comments here, I realized I was wrong. The brand Teflon replaced PFOA with GenX, a different fluorosurfactant that's probably worse than PFOA. From what I can tell, fluorosurfactants are more or less required to make PTFE and it seems quite likely that all fluorosurfactants are toxic. Personally I choose to use Teflon for eggs and stainless or cast iron for everything else. That feels like a decent trade off to me comparing years of life lost from liver cancer to time spent scraping scrambled eggs off of pans.
I want to add that a lot of cool startups are working on PFAS remediation. One I know of is Cyclopure, they make a Brita filter replacement that filters out PFAS (it's very expensive at the moment, though). Probably worth it if you live near a chemical plant, airport, or US military facility (airports and military bases both use PFAS fire-extinguishing foams which they typically fail to contain).
I appreciate you updating your comment with an informed update that contradicted your initial argument. When a consumer chemical is discovered to be harmful, there's a tendency from companies to ask their research chemists to come up with a new chemical that shares the same beneficial properties but without the baggage of the provably dangerous chemical. There's a VERY good chance that the new chemical simply hasn't been studied enough and that long term study will show comparable biological properties (harm).
I personally don't trust 'BPA-free' plastics for this reason. And try as much as I can to use steel/glass containers for liquids. At this point, I'm assuming anything 'teflon-like' will have negative impact on humans, until it has been proven safe in long term studies. You don't want to be an early adopter for industrial chemicals.
IMO, the biggest risk is infant exposure. Infants are exposed to more micro plastics than adults [1]. Bottle fed babies may be exposed to over 1.5 million particles of microplastics per day on average [2].
We avoid plastic in our kitchen (especially heating it in the dishwasher and microwave) but plastic is difficult to get away from when pumping breast milk. All pumps on the market, aside from silicone hand pumps, have plastic parts that require sanitization after every use.
That’s certainly troubling but it’s different from chemicals like PFAS and plasticizers. Those are things with known risks. We don’t know what microplastics do to human biology.
Uh, just because I haven't undergone starburns (nuclear explosion burns, they're like sunburns but they pierce the skin) from a weird new metal doesn't mean it's safe. On the contrary, it's unsafe, and you have no idea what the fuck to do about it. At least PFAS and plasticizers, like the Teflon pan I talk about, I can say, OK this chemical is too good to be true, in that it has amazing non-stick properties and simultaneously will harm my masculinity hormonally, on a par with a kick in the testicles for every scratch. I just have to respect it very, very much and it will be useful to me.
Whereas microplastics, you don't know how to deflect or stop the harm. You're like a starburned Hiroshima resident, you realize those guys consistently got shit advice from their doctors, those doctors were of no benefit, fucking waste of money? And as always, like in the Bible for instance, it's very rare for a doctor ever to tell you he's a fucking waste of money. Became a doctor out of love of money, in America at least, it's uniformly like that. Only the greed can get med students through the hazing. I know doctors who also help people, don't just make a lot of money, but they still actually do make a lot of money, they just help people too.
Well there's hundreds if not thousands of different kinds of plastics. Some are amazing and more expensive than gold...I think there's some like that, they're just currently very difficult to manufacture and highly miraculous, like they resist really high temperatures and...endless virtue. Reading Plastics I think makes specialty plastics.
Clinical trials...you know I've lost absolutely all respect for any number that a doctor or hospital reports. The sixes could be upside-down 9's. As the palindrome goes, si es nueve, se ve un seis. Just fudge numbers in embarrassing childish ways, the Sacklers specialize in that. A friend was telling me, initially he thought statistics in medicine could be heavily slanted.
No.
They can make whatever shit they want up, literally no limits. Science as a means of getting knowledge has some benefits and some shortcomings. In particular the scientist can just lie, and the other scientists in general won't verify what he said, the rewards are for coming up with the theory, not dismantling lies. Plus there's careers and power involved, you can't just call a prestige institution scientist a liar, he'll be pissed, he'll go through your science and find your errors and get a colleague he can deny knowing to publish that. Chomsky did this to the Piraha linguist. Academia is sharp elbows. With doctors, holy shit, you can't just say eg Jorge Barros is a bad scientist, he's the dean of a prestige institution, where is your prestige to speak against him? Which prestige institutions have you gone to?
Science is easily prostituted. I did it myself in the sixth grade, handed in work I did at last minute on the bus ride to school, which was supposed to take eight hours. Perfect score. Although apparently the work was correct, I didn't actually do the process to arrive at that answer. It's just not a very robust heuristic for acquiring knowledge. It's easily understood, I learned the scientific method in the third grade, probably a simplified version of it, but I don't see any better in the academic papers I read. Plato said so, science sucks for acquiring knowledge, math yeah but science no.
By this point I don't trust a single FDA number. Like the letters a bit, but not one number. Not one. Can't call them on the phone because I have no idea which numerals are secretly supposed to be which others, don't know the secret codes, when to dial a 3 when it says to dial an 8. Like OK they can make sure bacon is safe even for secular Jews whom are really vulnerable to bad pork, and make sure aspirin I buy at pharmacies for the occasional headache isn't loaded with crystal meth for repeat business, barely. That's about it. Like after the Sacklers bribed them into saying 7 equals 12 it's just not the same. Tortured hundreds of thousands of people--fucking with people's pain medication is for sure torture--and only had to give up a fraction of the ill-gotten gains. Sacklers did that again only in that case it was 60 equals 100.
FDA is just impossible to respect at this point. It's not even 2+2 is 5, that involves addition, it's an understandable mistake for like a 4-year-old compared to this shit, this is just fucking with the identity of numbers. Fucking with the metric system, with the passage of time itself, the units, and all the patients who suffer. Just fucking with all patients, and fucking with me.
Well they've always been known violers. They're captured by big pharma to justify charging crazy prices for chemicals that cost a dollar per gram to manufacture. R&D cost masochism. They fuck over small companies developing new drugs too, in darkness and silence (very muffled screaming). There's tons of cures that don't reach the market because FDA fucks up--openly--medical trials. Human error, but oh whoops you have to pay for it all over again if you want to put it on the market. Well in that case the VC's fucked that company...the company got double-teamed.
FDA is alchemy. Makes gold out of trivially cheap organic chemicals. The opposite of Reading Plastics.
So if I understand you correctly, you just throw out all the science that says it’s safe (and had a long track record of being right) and instead go with “plastics are dangerous” despite having little evidence to back the claim up?
I mean, if science is corrupt it’s corrupt, if you just pick and choose what you believe all the while ignoring how rigorous the analysis was, you’re not following science at all. You're just expressing an opinion without anything to back it up.
I like science as a concept I think it's a cool technique. I liked science courses I took, and I got very high grades, partly because I understood it's dark side, its secret double life as a whore, and knew when an experiment in class would just never produce the results the teacher could buy into for the grade I needed for the college admission results I wanted. The teachers were good, but usually didn't have the deep knowledge of physics to see when there were fucky things at work in the experiments.
Feynman talks about this in one of his books, he was going to Brazil to help them out with efforts to educate their students in science. So they had a test--I believe a standardized test, multiple choice, or there was a rubric with a right answer and a protocol for demerits for other answers--and it was about a cylinder filled with water rolling down a ramp and onto a table. The right answer was a wrong answer. Feynman told them, clearly you did not actually perform this experiment, the inertia of the water--some turbulence thing--makes it roll...from memory I think it was a seventh longer roughly. Feynman knew. I believe the Brazilians actually then carried out the experiment and saw it knew its master, Feynman was right theoretically. Hey first the teacher must learn, then the teacher can teach the student. So for teachers like that, who didn't have that Feynman scientific depth--but were honest and dedicated and helped us learn--for them you had to massage the numbers. And that massage always had to lead to a happy ending. Or no elite college admission.
So well I was a great student, perhaps the best mathematician in the grade, while also very into science very early on--loved it, loved studying insects, loved carrying out experiments, loved my chemistry kit, my electronics kits, loved soldering to the point I made a sculpture by soldering (wire and lead, the electric hound from Fahrenheit 451), plus I fixed all kinds of stuff around the house, and understood the material, so when it came to pulling numbers out of my ass, a strict necessity in that context, I pulled out some pretty good believable numbers consistent with theory but with maybe a little noise, not to the level of making up systematic error for credibility, but yeah a little noise fudging. And that's what's on the curriculum, get real, a friend actually performed tons of experiments verifying Newtonian physics, only he had to pull numbers every time, Newton did not check out experimentally, my friend had to massage the numbers heavily according to the theory. And they all had happy endings.
Like science is good but it depends on the honesty of scientists, the academic environment, and even then, needs to be taken with a little sodium chloride.
I do not trust BPA-free plastics either. I have switched from cans to tetrapaks where possible. My confusion came from some misleading industry documents I read which suggested that PFOA/PFOS/C8 had been replaced with a process that did not require fluorosurfactants. I feel like the information about these chemicals is so confusing, it's hard for a non-chemist like me to understand.
Due to our permission-first society, manufacturers can just replace BPA with a similar analogue, claim that it's BPA-free (which is technically true, but doesn't mention that the replacement is probably similarly problematic), and likely charge a premium for it.
Glass packaged tuna and tomatoes are very expensive compared to tetrapaks. They are lined with plastic but it doesn’t use hardening agents as I understand.
Can you elaborate ? What's wrong with cans ? If they're aren't just aliminum what are they coated with on the inside ? How would tetrapak fare better ?
It has changed now but, "For decades, most canned food manufacturers used can linings made of epoxy resin based on bisphenol A, or BPA, making food the primary route of our exposure to this toxic chemical." From here: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/bpa-update-tracking-c...
For people who care: thermopaper receipts are absolutely loaded with BPA. Cashiers have measurably higher serum BPA levels, because they touch them all day long.
I generally don't take or touch receipts if I can avoid it, but I don't treat them like they're radioactive. The dose makes the poison, and I haven't figured out how to completely eliminate them and still function in society.
With the initial Covid protocols training everybody into becoming constant receptacles for hand sanitizer, thermal receipt paper is probably worth being concerned about at this point.
printing with ink is not madly expensive. Thermal paper should just be banned. Its a ridiculous product anyway the way it just goes blank long before the warranty expires.
https://www.digitalcheck.com/receipts-thermal-ink-costs/
> There’s one other small difference that’s become important in the battle between thermal and ink: the use of company logos on receipts. As it turns out, this is a key factor in the cost of paper, and tips the break-even point in favor of thermal if you want your receipts to have a distinctive look. Ordinarily, plain receipt paper can be had for as little as 40 cents per 150-foot roll, while thermal paper comes in longer rolls (220 or 230 feet) that cost around 80 cents – so you get 25-30% more paper for your dollar with the standard variety.
BPA-free thermal paper is available and some chains have switched. For example:
Costco warehouses in the U.S. and Canada have changed their receipt paper so that it is phenol-free. This means it does not contain Bisphenol A (BPA) and Bisphenol S (BPS), which have been linked to human health concerns. - https://www.costco.com/sustainability-chemical-management.ht...
Because my consumer-grade fingertips don't run mass spec, I'm going to continue not touching receipts as much as possible. Hopefully some people who read this have a connection to a company that issues printed receipts.
They have an epoxy coating with on the inside which contains BPA or BPA substitutes like BPB. Tetrapaks have a polyethylene liner and polyethylene and typically doesn’t have plasticizers added.
Do you know why the two plastics are different? I would naively expect that everything that would work as the inner layer in tetrapak would also work in cans (cans deform less). Is it that making the layer stick to tetrapak is simpler/different than making it stick to metal?
And, for the cans, it then cures in place. The BPA is like a catalyst and doesn't bind with the material, which is what allows it to leach out so well.
Polyethylene, in addition to being a safer molecule, uses catalysts which don't end up in the final product, which means you can't be exposed to them.
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There's two diners in my town who have the best root beer, it's barqs, but it's served in mason jars.
Soda tastes better, anything tastes better in a glass container.
Even aluminum canned soda has an aluminum taste, plastic bottles have an after taste.
Maybe we need to ditch plastic and aluminum packaging for bottles like we used to.
I still buy plenty of drinks in plastic but if I have an option for the same price I'll get it in glass, for instance grape jelly. It's roughly the same cost for plastic or glass.
I think there is quite a difference though in the lifecycle between glass & aluminium. Glass can work when it's local and smaller producers, but on large scale production and national distribution it can introduce several problems.
Glass is competitively heavy and thick so adds to transport requirements. It also can't [generally] be made on site, unlike cans which are generally formed in the food factory for larger scale producers.
There is also breakages to consider. Modern 'bottling' plants move at an incredible speed and where glass is fragile any chips or breakages can shut the line down for cleaning; shards of glass are nasty to get in your drink. There is also transport, rough handling is much more likely to break glass bottles than burst cans, the cleanup is also easier with cans, and as glass weighs more it also adds to handling costs. This also applies to recycling, a bottle takes up much more space in your recycling bin than a bottle does.
Personally I too prefer glass, but once you get beyond extremely local small scale production the considerations change dramatically.
Why do you think so? To me the taste of Pepsi from aluminum can or plastic bottle is completely different. Granted, I didn't do blind testing (I should - good idea), but either the can or the drink have a pretty specific taste that is not there in plastic bottles and that I associate with Al.
I cook eggs on cast iron without them sticking, but it requires maintenance on the seasoning. The trick is to use some butter when cooking with eggs, and they slide right off. A quick wipe with a paper towel and the pan is clean (leaving butter residue helps keep it oiled for next time).
Cast iron is a pain to clean if you burn food and the burnt pieces stick, but the investment into learning how to cook with it is worth the reward imo.
+1 for carbon steel! We switched our teflon pans to carbon steel about 5 years ago. Mostly because I was tired of replacing scratched Teflon every so many years (cost and waste) on top of the health implications. We own cast iron too, but the carbon steel and stainless steel pans do the bulk of our cooking just because they're lighter.
It's one of my fav kitchen purchases. The only annoyance was getting the beeswax off the pans on the first day.
The trick seems to be too use several carbon steel pans when necessary. One thing you can do in teflon that you can't do in steel is fry up yer veggies and yer meat in the pan, then crack the eggs in, stick-free.
So, use two pans, one foot the fillings and a fresh one for the eggs, adding the fillings once the eggs hit the oiled pan. Afterwards, neither needs more than a rinse out.
Carbon steel works great! The first time I used it I was kind of shocked that such a simple solution isn't the standard way it's done. Cast iron can be a little bit inconvenient due to the weight but carbon steel is literally no different from cooking in a teflon pan, you just clean it different.
cast iron is better at searing in my experience. I mostly use my hexclad for stuff that requires up to medium heat, but for searing and blackening stuff, nothing works like my cast iron skillet that I preheat in the oven to 450 for the sear.
The testing results are hidden, but there is more info on the pans generally. They’re a subscription site, and mine lapsed. I have their cookbooks though.
The thing you need to be careful with using a cast iron pan is to not go too high heat. Since they can withstand a higher heat from other pans there is a risk when doing so as it creates a carcinogenic compound.
There's some concern that because cast-iron pans can sustain high heat, they may produce chemicals known as heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are linked to an increased risk of cancer.
These chemicals form when meat, including beef, pork, fish and chicken, are cooked using high-temperature cooking techniques, like pan-frying and grilling over an open flame, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Not sure how much the increased risk is but just something to consider.
Indeed. Any kind of burning or charring of food is causing really complex chemistry, and with organic molecules will likely produce aromatics, etc. (benzene is the prototypical aromatic and is present in cooking oil fumes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4029104/ ). I think about this a lot when we’re cautioned about the presence of extremely minuscule amounts of industrial chemicals, some of the same that are present in charred food.
What I find odd is usually our bodies are extremely good at warning us of a lot of dangers. Things that are bitter don’t eat. Things that smell very fowl maybe don’t want to eat. But barbecued food smell and taste so good with a slight char on the outside. Our senses let us down if they truly are bad for you.
The most important thing I learned about cast iron is that the idea that you have to baby it is a hold over from the days when soap had lye in it. Today’s dish detergent is fine and won’t damage your seasoning, neither will basic green nylon scrubbing sponges. I was almost despondent about my carefully seasoned pans not delivering until I really went to town on them and removed the dull layer of burned on material and got them back to a shine. Now the eggs slide off.
Yep. Your cast iron will straight up work better if you thoroughly clean it with detergent and manual scrubbing, thanks to removing the rough and/or sticky surface layer of partially-polymerized fats and oils.
The biggest thing to remember after washing with detergent and water is the same thing to remember after just rinsing: dry it thoroughly. The easiest way to do that is to wipe it down with a towel and/or leave it on the heat for a bit. Then apply a bit of oil.
you need to heat the oil so it polymerizes and creates a strong nonstick bond. if you simply wipe it with oil when it's hot it will get sticky and not season properly.
Learning to "proof" steel is something worth spending time on.
I was taught by a Chinese room-mate at college who showed me
how to prepare a wok.
- 1. Heat the thing up as HIGH as it will go, till parts of the base
glow red if you can. Gas is better than electric heat.
- 2. splash a little vegetable oil in and swill it around to cover
all the surface. It may ignite, ignore the short lived flames, but
brush it around with a paper towel so that the carbonised film covers
the surface with a black layer.
- 3. Add some fine salt. Use the paper towel to rub it around until a
shiny and slightly bluish and rainbow colour carbon later coats the
surface.
This will be as good as any teflon for a few cookings.
Right, but unlike fluorinated compounds those toxins can be broken down by your body and flushed out (I could be wrong?). For example, alcohol is pretty toxic to us.
Reckons main issue is that it degassed the chemicals into the air. With most range hoods just recirculating the air you're basically getting a face full of it every time you cook.
Doesn't Teflon degrade due to the high Temps? I really don't know that much about it, but it's just the opposite with cast iron seasoning: heat hardens.
We were talking about scrubbing.
For heating, lots of carcinogenic compounds are released during the process of seasoning, and I don't see why the same wouldn't continue to happen at high heats afterwards(happy to be corrected). Hardening and releasing dangerous compounds aren't mutually exclusive.
I believe the seasoning instructions for Matfer carbon steel pans involve cooking a mixture of potato peels and salt with a bit of oil until crispy (while moving constantly), which seems to do a pretty nice job of starting the seasoning on those.
I do the same except I use ghee. My grandparents all lived to their 80s in Bangladesh and at this point I’m just trying to do what they did instead of trusting western science. (Aside from vaccines put the pitchforks away.)
Look into Oeufs Brouillés (French Scrambled Eggs) for cooking on stainless steel. Low heat and constant whisking - the eggs are so fluffy and delicious! And cleanup is easy.
I've been experimenting with a plug-in induction cooktop with my cast iron pan, overall I like it quite a lot and I can picture a dream house for me having both induction and gas. I still prefer gas (and have been using a butane camping stove rather than my rental's crappy electric, which is relegated to long-cooking things like boiling or steaming) but induction is easier to keep clean. I've been keeping the glass from scratching by putting a layer of baking/parchment paper between it and the pan, and that makes things even easier to clean since I can just toss the paper when it has too many grease splatters. I also tried one of those silicone pads but I think the weight+heat of the cast iron caused it to start melting, so far my friend's use of non-cast iron pans with the silicone pad hasn't been a problem.
By mess do you mean scratching the glass surface? My ~$15 lodge cast iron has been fine on the electric stovetops in my last 3 apartments. They weren't super high quality cooktops either: the last nonstick pan I owned scratched the crap out of one of them in a matter of days.
I don't move the cast iron pan around a lot when I cook, but they're too heavy to do that anyway really, and unlike some thin stainless pans they don't warp so won't "walk" around the surface.
>I have seen the mess heavy cookware creates on those glass top cooktops - old style coils seems to be best for those.
I have successfully removed the cast-iron crud from a glass-ceramic cooktop using a paste of 91% rubbing alcohol and baking soda. You can speed up the process by scraping with the back of a knife a few times first. Overall, it's not slower than cleaning the grease traps on a coil stove.
Unfortunately with electric stovetops, pans only get heated under the electric source. I love my large cast iron frying pan but only getting heat in the center makes cooking with it a pain/doesn't work well. Gas stoves don't have this problem as the heat from the burner rises up and around the pan heating it all up.
We have a GE electric glass top stove which works fine with our stainless steel, carbon steel, and cast iron cookware. My only complaint is I prefer the control and instant heat of a flame over an electrical burner. Electric is slower to heat up, and retains its heat after its off compared to a flame. But I adjusted and got used to it.
> If not, are there good electric stoves that work with hard cast iron pans?
Induction works great. You onnly need gas for wok. It also doesn't become dirty like a resistive stove but you do have to be careful not to drop the skillet onto the glass.
It works well (I use carbon steel on induction daily).
What the poster may mean is that a carbon steel pan must be heated slowly (i.e. on half power) until it is all the way hot. Then you can use a higher power setting if you want. If you don't do it this way supposedly the pan warps, but I haven't been brave enough to test whether or not that's really true.
That said, heating on medium until it's hot takes a few minutes at worst. I don't really see what the big deal is.
I actually wonder if the charred food contains just as toxic of chemicals? Heating edible oils above 200C and/or for prolonged periods produces transfats, for instance, and there is extremely complex chemistry going on in the burnt portion of foods (or really any substance containing a kind of organic molecule).
It is my understanding that heating edible oils will not produce trans fats unless there is a catalyst to donate hydrogen, a vacuum and a prolonged period of time longer than average cooking times. It is unlikely that a person cooking at home will create trans fats.
Different oils have different smoke points, and heating an oil beyond that smoke point can polymerize the oil and produce free radicals.
Charring foods can create heterocyclic amines, which are associated with cancers.
Liquid oils contain cis double bonds that will isomerize to trans when heated (no H required). Short cooking times will minimise this, or you can use a saturated fat like butter.
Yes but you can always avoid them unlike "forever" chemicals leaked by your non-sticky pan. They're called forever chemicals because they never break down. I don't think charred food can contaminate your food and drinking water.
I have no trouble at all cleaning cast iron skillets as long as I put it under some water while it's still hot and give it a little wipe. Doesn't seem to affect the seasoning either ..
Putting a bit of water (or other liquid) in hot pans is a generally good idea to turn your fond into a sauce anyways - it's a technique called de-glazing[1].
You should avoid putting some cookwear directly into cool water though - the temperature shock can cause cracking and other damage if it's coated. I don't have a great rule of thumb for this, you should just double check any advice you can find specific to your cookwear.
that's the key, take it out immediately using HOT water from the tap to clean it out works great. Even when cold though it's not that hard to clean with a plastic or wood scraper if it's properly seasoned.
Protip for cleaning food gunk that doesn't want to go: boiling water. It's impressive how much stuff just sort of... falls away if your water is real hot. I use a dish brush to get the stickier stuff. If it's being stubborn I just dig in with a metal spatula. Haven't noticed any adverse effects yet.
My only problem is making sauces and tomato based dishes. In both cases the sauce penetrated the pan (and sticks). Tomato anything is also problematic because it’s acidic and doesn’t do the cast iron or carbon steel pans any favor. Would love to hear a workaround if anyone knows one though because I want to ditch the Teflon oan.
just don't scrub hard with them, they absolutely will remove/scratch up your seasoning. had to re-season a pan recently because my roomie doesn't understand you need to preheat cast iron to pretty hot before you cook a bunch of cheese and egg omelets in it. He felt guilty and went to town with the chain mail scrubber when you just need to gently scrub with it.
Yep! A small amount of thick kosher salt and a paper towel is all I ever need if something sticks to a cast iron or carbon steel pan. Do it while it's still hot and it's easier. And if it's stainless steel, I boil some water with a drop of dish soap and baking soda. Whatever is stuck lifts off by itself.
I assume they switched to a less studied but very similar analog, like happened with BPA?
Edit: Yep, of course they did.
> Another potential concern is that other PFAS are now in use. For example, hexafluoropropylene oxide (HFPO, also known as a ‘GenX’ chemical) is often used to replace PFOA in manufacturing processes, while perfluorobutane sulfonic acid (PFBS) is used as a replacement for PFOS. New PFAS also continue to be developed. These chemicals haven’t been around long enough for researchers to fully understand if they might have the same (or even different) health effects.
I think the end goal is to not use a similar analogue. The problematic chemicals are fluorosurfactants used in production, and they are not actually useful in the final pan. Manufacturers are working on getting rid of them:
As far as I know, PTFE itself is also a “forever chemical”, but it’s an extremely inert polymer and is unlikely to be particularly dangerous as long as it doesn’t get too hot. (PFOA and PFOS are water soluble. PTFE is not.)
Usually beyond the range you normally cook at, but definitely achievable if you leave a pan unattended for a minute, or use it with insufficient coverage. Pet birds are extremely vulnerable, and there's plenty of stories of them dying due to nonstick cookware. I get little benefit from nonstick cookware, so for me the "canary in the kitchen" aspect was enough reason to eliminate it from the house.
Not really. And I say this as someone who owns and frequently cooks with stainless steel, cast iron, and non-stick, I have for decades and also worked in a professional kitchen at one point.
Some things are always better in stainless or cast iron... I tend towards meats in cast iron and veggies in stainless, though it really depends.
Other things are easiest in nonstick, but can be learned in stainless, like eggs sunny-side up. Eggs overeasy without breaking the yolk is really hard though. You can do it, but it's not something you're gonna learn quick.
But there are still other things that you're basically insane to try in anything but nonstick, like thin light fish for example. Hence why professional kitchens still use lots of nonstick, even cooks who have all the technique you can have.
(And as wonderful as your cast iron patina may be, the idea that it's somehow equivalent to "nonstick" is utter nonsense. Obviously a patina is necessary, but it's not like frying eggs is ever any easier in cast iron than it is in stainless. As with stainless, any and all non-sticking is due to using lots of oil on top of a flat surface.)
> Eggs overeasy without breaking the yolk is really hard though.
This is strange to hear from a professional chef. I cook eggs overeasy on my cast iron all the time. What works for me is preheating the pan on moderate heat for a minute or two, putting in a bit of butter, and using a metal spatula. Haven't had a broken egg in forever.
I've certainly found you need less oil to prevent sticking on a well-seasoned cast iron compared to others. It really is a semi-nonstick layer. I've made eggs on mine with no butter just to test it out and with the right heat they didn't stick.
But I guess if you have other tools that are easier for the same result, there's not much reason to learn the harder one. Personally I like having a small collection of cast iron I can do anything with, one part saving space and one part just having a thing for cast iron.
Cast iron is great in a professional kitchen. It wears well. And it benefits from frequent use. Most home cooks won't use their cast iron cookware daily, let alone multiple times a day. That affects the seasoning.
To be fair, the vast majority of people I've lived with or know-well-enough-to-know-this-about-them (we need a word for this concept in English) can't be arsed to clean their pans immediately. Especially those who rely on a dishwasher.
Cast iron isn't compatible with that approach.
You have to be the type of person who can appreciate and capitalize on the fact that cleaning off eggs immediately after cooking takes 1 second while chiseling them off tomorrow can take 5 minutes.
Yeah, I don't consider a meal done being prepared until the counters are wiped down, everything is put away, pans are cleaned, and it's plated for everyone.
Part of why I do this is because I have 3 kids. They are off playing while I cook, and I take the extra few minutes to get the kitchen in a decent state before calling them to the table. Otherwise I'm never gonna get it done because once they have my attention it's difficult for them to let go of it.
I use my main pan daily, but I've also never had an issue pulling out my other pan after it's sat for a month or two and just using it. A really good seasoning helps with long term storage too.
the key is warm it up over medium low heat for me on cast iron for at last two minutes (I use the water test usually) then put in some butter/oil and do your thing. has to be hot, but not too hot. has to be well seasoned of course.
I add heaps of oil, and never have trouble cleaning my stainless steel pans.
But the whole “clean eating” thing seems to vilify any kind of cooking fat, and guests often give me the “guess we’re not on a diet today”. But from what I recall, cooking oil is not the thing driving the obesity pandemic, and the innocent muffin they had at work would easily be several multiples of the cooking oil, calorie-wise.
people are eating too much, plus sugar is really bad for humans and that's what is everywhere. Most of the danger of fats is gone with the vast reduction in amount of hydrogenated fats out there. Sugar is still king though.
You can get a nice carbon steel or cast iron pan nonstick enough to do things like classical omelets through seasoning alone. (Though the shape of cast iron generally makes it impractical in that particular example.) All the French old timers did. But they need to only be used for that and most home cooks aren't willing to have a pan they only use for one thing. Also, most home cooks-- even the ones that really think they do-- just don't have the kind of pan/utensil handling and heat management experience to make that happen because it's super fussy. Even thin light fishes can be totally fine with enough fat. I wouldn't consider making a sole meuniere in a nonstick pan because you can't build a fond... but most home cooks won't use that much fat either. I never worked in a professional kitchen that used nonstick for anything other than eggs, and they were ONLY used for eggs, and most of the cooks brought their own egg pans when they needed them. All the fish went into regular aluminum skillets or carbon steel pans. At the temperatures required to cook eggs, there's like zero danger using a modern teflon coated pan. It's the people cranking those pans up to smoking temperatures that you have to worry about. That shit is nasty.
> But they need to only be used for that and most home cooks aren't willing to have a pan they only use for one thing.
I have a cheap 10" Lodge skillet that we use for everything. It pretty much lives on the stovetop. We make omelets every morning, wash it off, and put back on the stove to dry. Quesadillas at lunch. Red sauce for dinner. Potato gratin. Pineapple upside-down cake. You name it, it goes in the skillet, often without any oil.
The only time I ever have trouble with stuff sticking is after several days in a row of tomatoes or similar. Acidic stuff like that does damage the seasoning, and if you let it sit it will stick. Other than that, stuff comes right off even after hours of sitting around.
So many people seem to think you have to baby these skillets, and that's just not been my experience at all. It's not as nonstick as a brand-new teflon pan, but it's better than that same pan will be after 6 months, and if I damage the seasoning on my cast iron it really does repair itself through normal cooking (with a bit of extra oil in the meantime).
Sure. You don't need to baby a cast iron skillet to get decent stick protection for those applications. Even an egg dish like Tortilla Espanola or an American omelet would fare fine in a decently seasoned home cast iron skillet with proper heat control. But a classical french omelet requires vastly more stick protection and surface smoothness.
In Jaques Pepin's well known video on making classical french omelets, he laments that he uses a non-stick pan because his carbon steel omelet pan isn't in the proper condition to make a proper french omelet. I guarantee you that Pepin has better pan and utensil technique than damn near anyone you'll meet in your life, but a surface for that dish requires babying.
There are good reasons that the only place you'll see cast iron skillets in a commercial kitchen is for cute presentations. They work decently for home cooks in many circumstances but they're too inconvenient to replaces the trusty commercial aluminum sautee pan as the classic blunt instrument, and not precise enough to perform the more specialized duties of commercial nonstick and carbon steel pans.
>> At the temperatures required to cook eggs, there's like zero danger using a modern teflon coated pan. It's the people cranking those pans up to smoking temperatures that you have to worry about.
go look it up, if you keep teflon (PTFE, and not PFOAs which are all but gone in pans less than 10 years old) under 500 you're golden. No one is going to give you a bibliography for something you can google easily in seconds.
If you do, and you take the ‘first hit’ for the truth as parent suggested in a reply (it says it is not safe), does that lead you to believe that this issue is so simple as ‘don’t let your pan get hot’, or could there be other factors to consider, like, for example, exposing the pan to other chemicals, abrasion, etc?
PTFE is basically completely safe for humans because it goes right through you as it doesn't break down anywhere along the digestive path and basically completely unreactive in the human body, it is used often in biological implants. PFOAs are the villains and yeah if you have cheap nonstick pans 10+ years old then toss them. Yes I know exactly what I'm talking about and what kind of pans I have because I did my own research on the topic t-fal, hexclad, etc are perfectly fine.
I discovered a trick to use a sanding attachment for a drill to progressively polish my stainless steel frying pans to a mirror finish.
If you then put fish / eggs in it after heating up a generous amount of oil to >boiling, it effectively acts nearly as good as a brand new nonstick pan.
Mirrored finish is worse for some things (browning vegetables) but great for delicate tasks like French omelettes.
How tf do I do stainless sunny-side up without them sticking all over the bottom of the pan? I can do scrambled perfectly with no sticking at all[0], but sunny side up is a mystery. Can't get the whites cooked through without cooking most of the yolk/overcooking bottoms of whites. I cook eggs every morning.
[0] the trick is getting the pan hot enough for a water flick to jump and dance before putting oil or butter in.
1) Put drop of vegetable oil in stainless steel pan
2) heat until oil begins to smoke
3) quickly spread oil with paper towel or silicone brush, or by tilting the pan, then remove pan from heat
The pan now has a thin non-stick film, but it is too hot for butter or eggs, so...
4) let the pan cool down a bit
5) add butter
6) add egg
If I do that the stainless steel pan works almost as well as a teflon pan.
Getting sunny side up eggs perfect is still hard, in my experience. In a hotel, I've seen the cook carefully spread out the egg-white with a spatula so it cooks faster, while leaving the yolk liquid.
I add heat back when adding butter, but I use use less heat than before.
Also I realised that I mixed up step 2 and 3 -- I spread the oil before it starts to smoke.
Also, sometimes I cool the pan by holding it under the tap with a dash of water. Then it cools down instantly and stops smoking.
I think what's happening is that the oil polymerizes due to the heat and creates a thin film on the stainless steel pan, similar seasoning cast iron cookware. Afterwards you can cook the egg on low heat and it doesn't stick. But the film comes off when washing, so you have to do it again every time.
I don't cook anything that causes me a problem using stainless steel but I accept there may be cases where non-stick is essential.
My earlier point could be expanded to:
Make stainless steel your primary cookware and only fall back to a non-stick option when absolutely necessary. In doing so, you're risking far less exposure than someone who uses that stuff for everything they cook.
IR thermometer is a good thing to have and it takes a lot of guessing out from heating the pan correctly and heat control. I haven't burned oil in ages. Works best with the cast iron pans, due to the black non-reflective finish.
not a professional, but i do love to cook. eggs for me are 100x easier on cast iron vs. steel. i only use steel for sauces and veggies, everything else cast iron.
One thing I've noticed with stainless steel is that if you have hard water, you get some calcium buildup and things stick like crazy. Anytime my stainless steel pans start having problems I soak a bit of vinegar on them for a bit, scrub them, then they are good again.
However my preference is typically cast iron. A good seasoned coating (and a couple decades of use that results in a polished surface) is typically much better than any non-stick I've ever used, but again depending on temperature (get it hot enough but not too hot), and having a lightly wiped on fresh oil coating too.
> if you have hard water, you get some calcium buildup and things stick like crazy.
Anyone using stainless cookware should be using Bar Keepers Friend, it's like magic on stainless steel.
The oxalic acid in it removes calcium buildup and helps passivate the stainless steel, the surfactant in it somehow dissolves browned oil stains (even the nasty burned in ones on the bottom of the pot) and the feldspar dust in it provides a bit of abrasive action. Smells funny though. And wear gloves.
The only extra work is it really needs to thoroughly rinsed off or the feldspar dust leaves white residue when it dries.
I use 600 wet/dry sandpaper with canola oil when things start to get nasty. sometimes I have to use 2 or 3 pieces if there is enough gunk. comes out pretty damn polished.
Don't forget that with stainless steel you can also put it in the dishwasher (unlike teflon and aluminum), use sharp utensils on it (unlike teflon), and use it on induction cooktops (unlike aluminum and some teflon depending on their base material). Its such a wonderful "takes abuse and keeps working without giving you cancer" material. Cleanup is easy too because if my stainless steel pots/pans accumulate a layer of baked-on grease or really any sort of dirtiness, I just quickly clean it with barkeeper's friend and then it looks like the day I got it.
I treasure my stainless-clad aluminum (stainless by itself has very poor thermal performance) pans above almost all my other possessions, but I wouldn't call them nonstick. Sometimes it's a feature. You can use the fond (the browned bits stuck to the pan) to make a pan sauce. If you want a plastic-free nonstick pan, better options are cast iron, carbon steel, and ceramic. All have their own downsides, but well-seasoned cast iron and carbon steel are incredibly nonstick with just a little bit of fat when hot.
I agree - I wonder what the relative risk is between getting liver cancer from PFAS exposure in teflon vs carcinogenic risk in the seasoning layers on cast iron pans or smoking oil in stainless pans?
Any time there is incomplete combustion of carbon compounds like cooking oil, carcinogenic molecules like benzo-a-pyrene are formed, which appears to cause or contribute to skin, lung, and bladder cancer.
Is this true of all oils? I thought some (e.g. olive) are much better than others (cheap seed oils). I also thought risk increases with temperature, so unless you're smoking it on medium-high heat and consuming large amounts regularly it's probably not worth worrying about given that alternatives to cooking for yourself are mostly much worse.
My understanding of the "seed oils are bad" angle is that Olive oil is high in Monounsaturated fat which breaks down/oxidizes under heat but is low in polyunsaturated fat/linoleic acid unlike vegetable oils, which oxidizes more easily during digestion, while heated and resting. Coconut oil/ghee/lard are high in saturated fat which don't oxidize under heat as easily as their chemical bonds are stronger which was previously considered to raise cholesterol and be unhealthy. So Olive oil would be alright as long as it wasn't being exposed to high heat like frying, but would be fine on a salad.
Even extra virgin olive oil is at best neutral or likely still bad for arterial function. You don't have to burn oils for them to have negative effects on your body.
canola and olive oils are fine, and even good for you. Just count them towards your caloric intake as they do have a lot of calories. measure out a tablespoon and don't just pour it in. Heat and a little oil go a long way. As long as you aren't heating your oil so much that it smokes you are good.
no they aren't. do some research on pubmed or some place on canola/soy/butter/olive oil. No one is saying hydrogenated oils are okay though, but recent research shows all the crap out of the 60s and 70s is garbage research, recent publications do not back it up especially when you cut way back on refined carbs and sugar which contributes much more to diseases than any other food item.
I am not really qualified to make this evaluation myself, but I will note that the video is produced by a nutrition-focused doctor in 2015, featuring research from the 2000's. It seems that "endothelial function" a concern, though I don't know what that means.
One of the studies and highlighted paragraphs from the video:
"There was a significant and constant decrease in FMD 3 h after each
meal intake ... independently of the type of oil used for the preparation of
the meal ... or the deep-fry level..."
(I don't know what that means but it was cited in the video as bad, and the research is from 2007)
Pans that aren't non-stick can be made far less sticky by not adding anything (except maybe some fat—oil, grease, lard, butter [ghee especially], et c.) until after they're hot. I think it causes phase-changing water in whatever you added to kind of push the food off the pan. You can see this in action by dripping water onto the pan—when it's hot enough, the water will ball up and kinda dance on the pan, while lightly sizzling (that's the lowest point at which it's OK to add food and it probably won't stick much—hotter and the water will sizzle aggressively and may evaporate too fast to really evaluate its behavior, of course, and for most purposes this is too hot to add food anyway, as it'll instantly burn the parts that touch first)
This makes very low-temp or delicate cooking in non-teflon pans a lot tougher, of course. Or anything for which starting from a low temp and slowly increasing is a nice thing to be able to do (tempering chocolate, for example)
[EDIT] Basically the value prop of teflon pans is that they can do just about everything at least well-enough (if not always being the best possible option) with just one type of pan, and that they are much more forgiving of lazy/untrained use or mistakes than stainless or cast iron. They can't do much that's impossible elsewhere, but it may require better technique and closer attention, and maybe having multiple types of pan, if you don't have a teflon option available. The above is one of the ways in which you have to apply some extra care and technique to avoid bad results, which can be all but totally ignored if you're using (undamaged) teflon.
Their main down-side (any health concerns aside) is that they are easily damaged by hard tools. With stainless and cast iron you can scramble your eggs with a metal fork, in a pinch, and it'll probably be entirely fine. Do that in teflon and you'll ruin the finish before long.
This is called the "Leidenfrost effect." The other possible health downside to doing this in a stainless steel pan, as referenced elsewhere in these comments, is the overheating of certain cooking oils beyond their smokepoint and into temperatures that turn them potentially bad for your health.
I cook with stainless steel, including eggs (probably the most challenging food here, IMO). For an over-easy egg, it's sufficient to simply pre-heat the skillet until butter will sizzle and quickly melt (but not brown) when added. For scrambled eggs I do the same, but also continuously rotate the eggs off/on heat. This not only cooks the eggs to a beautiful custard type texture, but also mostly if not entirely prevents sticking.
Almost everything else doesn't require particular consideration on stainless steel IMO. Potatoes can be more difficult than others though. Hash browns are easy, but little stir-fried potato cubes tend to stick.
With meat, generally, the food will unstick when it's sufficiently cooked, which is a handy coincidence if you ask me.
Give carbon steel a try. It's cheap. Once seasoned, they are wonderful. Being a little lighter and a little quicker to heat, compared to cast iron, makes a real difference.
nyc restauranteur frank prisinzano explains it well on his instagram highlights (a kind of mini, continuous cooking course). start with learning his crispy egg technique
try his limone if you liked that one. another expression of simplicity and straightforward principles. I don't know what he currently has up though because he deletes his videos routinely
I've seen well-seasoned cast iron that was nonstick if you treat it the same way as stainless: get it hot before adding anything, and put quite a bit of fat (oil, butter, grease, whatever) in first.
I've not seen any that were nonstick at low temp and with no fat in it, as teflon pans are. I can cold-start eggs in a bare teflon pan with no butter or bacon fat whatsoever, and make totally fine scrambled eggs while keeping the temp very low the entire time. I've seen some extremely well-seasoned cast iron pans (and they are damn nice, and quite nonstick, compared to steel or new cast iron) but they couldn't do that. Not without leaving a mess to clean up after and losing half your eggs to sticking. You could cook eggs in them and nothing would stick, but you had to start fairly hot and add a layer of fat first.
They also leach flavors into everything, which really comes through if you cook anything delicately-flavored in them, and even well-seasoned ones are vulnerable to anything acidic and will leach a ton of unwanted flavors if you cook with e.g. tomato sauce.
I still like them for lots of things, but they're not magic. Teflon... kinda is magic.
I am far from an expert, but there are hundreds of extremely similar but slightly modified versions of PFOA that haven’t been proven unsafe, so are still allowed, but they’re all so similar it’s hard to believe that they’ll have different affects.
We’ll see though in another 30-50 years how much they’ve hurt us again!
My wife and I tossed out all the Teflon cookware we had about 25 years ago and replaced it with cast iron and stainless steel. We've not missed it at all.
The thing I dislike about cast iron cookware is that it is extremely heavy. I sprained my elbow last year and couldn’t use any of my cast iron pans for three months. My mom hates them too, and avoids using them whenever she visits.
Some of ours are pretty heavy too. We also have some stainless steel pots and pans we use a lot and they're quite a bit lighter. But I should also mention we stopped using aluminum cookware back then too.
My attitude to Teflon is any harm to the pan is a kick in the balls to me. Because of the incredibly harmful effect on testosterone, it mimics testosterone hormone--almost identical shape, so what it does is it gets in the testosterone receptors and makes men less masculine. And it gets lodged in there. I suspect it's a driving factor in the surge of transexuality and male infertility (low sperm counts etc) because it's fucking everywhere and can impede masculinization very directly. Because the thing is, if you're going to be a man, you better be a hell of a man--then you get all the rewards--but if you're defective, not quite as resourceful, tolerant to pain, audacious, quick (testosterone increases your brain speed a bit), or like have a weaker frame, receding jaw, any one of dozens of signature flaws you get treated so much worse. So compromising masculinity--in particular what's called the brain waves, what that is is partly brain waves, which determine frequency of the brain, so you end up a bit slower, like 6 Hz instead of 7 Hz. Huge role in determining how much respect you get as a man. Second testosterone alters the brain, so more risk-seeking more pain-tolerant, and frequently, toxic masculinity ie plotting ways to take advantage of women, or more violent, or more dead-set on premeditated crime.
Teflon is also bad for women, who also produce and need testosterone in their own smaller quantities, it eg helps them be toned and thin, and is insufficient to trigger eg facial hair development. And I think when they are expecting a boy, there's something going on there, their testosterone helps that boy develop properly, not sure.
It's just a remarkable chemical that is great for bacon and eggs. So just super conservative with it, never put it under anything, only cook with a dedicated plastic thing, never permit anyone do anything with it. And guess what? It's just as effective--exactly as effective--as it was when I bought it, I successfully protected the surface and my masculinity with my conservative attitude toward it.
I switched to enamel non-stick pans and iron pans, and for me eggs work best when cooked with lard instead of vegetable oil. Lard went somewhat out of favor but i find it better for pan cooking than oil: probably due to the higher viscosity it creates a stabler lubrication film that doesn't break down as easily as that of cooking oil. Works even with stainless steel pans. Downside: different "lard" taste and the grease is harder to wash off your hands.
There are tons of cheap chinese cookware on amazon that probably still uses older Teflon. There is no way this can be regulated. I'll stick with iron skillet.
>That feels like a decent trade off to me comparing years of life lost from liver cancer to time spent scraping scrambled eggs off of pans.
Are you sure you meant that just how it reads like? I mean your life isn't something I want you trading for a while scraping your frying pan. Please forgive my impertinence, but if you're so down on your own value I can't help but stop and ask.[edit] ask if you're ok?
This comment and the subsequent edit is the usual result when looking deeply into the actual chemicals we consume and knowing whether or not they’re safe. The various ways toxins are in our food supplies and things we interact on a day to day basis is almost unavoidable at this point. Hopefully there will be a major shift at some point.
I use cast iron skillets for eggs, fried, omelettes, even scrambled.
A well-seasoned pan at the right temp with a bit of butter or ghee and my eggs basically don’t stick. I use a silicon spatula.
I won’t lie: it takes a bit more care than a Teflon pan, but I ditched my Teflon pots and pans years ago and haven’t looked back. Everything in my kitchen is cast iron, stainless, ceramic or glass.
The risk from burning a Teflon pan is enough reason to avoid it. I first heard about this from a person who kept rescued birds. Apparently birds are especially susceptible to toxic fumes. People overheat pans all the time. It seems crazy to not take that failure mode into account in evaluating Teflon's safety. I also do not FW fluorinated ski wax.
I use stainless steel pans, which are great. They are pretty much indestructible and not as expensive as I imagined. I think it's less than $100 for a stainless steel frying pan and I just use butter or olive oil to oil the pans and it's great. Sometimes things get burnt but an SOS pad a little elbow grease and it's back to normal.
> Personally I choose to use Teflon for eggs and stainless or cast iron for everything else.
OT, but are you trying to avoid cooking eggs with fat? Once I started making mine, over easy, with well-seasoned cast iron...I just could not go back to non-stick. Less than half a tsp of butter for two.
> to time spent scraping scrambled eggs off of pans.
At the right temperature on a stainless steel pan, there’s not much scraping needed to clean it off. Just a dash of water after you take the eggs off and some light scraping with your cooking utensil
I cook scramble eggs in cast iron and while it sticks a bit you wash it right away while it’s hot in water, takes less than a min. Given that you seasoned it and you don’t burn the egg
It’s exceeding easy to cook eggs on stainless steel or cast iron. If it’s a compelling reason to stick to Teflon this implies to me you’ve never bothered to spend 5 minutes learning to cook eggs on these substrates.
Notably, PFAS are in the food supply chain to a significant and non transparent degree.
Those compostable fiber salad bowls are up to 25% PFAS.
The extruders that make your dried pasta and other machine parts that make other processed foods are coated with PFAS.
The paper that your sandwich is packed in is coated with PFAS.
The paper straw that replaced your plastic one, to save the turtles...is coated with PFAS. Did you really think a cardboard straw could hold up for more than a few seconds in a cup of liquid without some type of coating??
That's the food supply. Don't get me started on everything else. The device you are touching right now, your cell phone screen, is coated with PFAS.
Yes. And coated cups like the kind you get for coffee don't use wax anymore (and if they do it's petroleum derived paraffin). They are more likely to use a high-temp polymer
Says you. Doesn't explain why drinking coffee from them triggers a corn allergy, while the exact same coffee from the same store/barrista in a ceramic cup is fine.
Not sure what you're referring to, but many of the cups use PLA liners which is corn plastic ("plant-based alternative"). So that stuff is not from petroleum. You ought to be able to identify, it's usually labeled on the cup, or the packaging
"Paper/paperboard food packaging: PFAS may be used as grease-proofing agents in fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, take-out paperboard containers, and pet food bags to prevent oil and grease from foods from leaking through the packaging."
> Those compostable fiber salad bowls are up to 25% PFAS
Do you have a source for that? I work with these and as far as I'm aware they are made with bagasse[1] and are not coated. The hard surface comes from pressure and heat.
Even in standard PE lined paper coffee cups the plastic is only 3-4& by weight, the rest being virgin paperboard.
Some of the board products, like the take-away containers and "plastic free" paper coffee cups use an aqueous dispersion coating. The manufacturers are generally quite cagey about what's in it because it's commercially sensitive, but they are all certified for direct food contact.
I guess the question is, does this coating contaminate and stick to the food? If so at which temperature? Does the content of the food matters? (for example acidity)
> However, Cousins noted that PFAS levels in people have actually dropped "quite significantly in the last 20 years" and "ambient levels (of PFAS in the environment) have been the same for the past 20 years".
> "What's changed is the guidelines. They've gone down millions of times since the early 2000s, because we've learned more about the toxicity of these substances."
Is there universal treatment for this in most countries or does this also imply that municipal water everywhere is equally "unsafe"? Some quick Googling suggests common britta filters don't remove it either, for instance.
unsafe in scare quotes because the article says environmental levels have been steady for the past 20 years and we aren't all dead yet... and lots of animals of course drink rainwater more directly out of bodies of water.
It's obviously not a good thing but I don't this means "we're doomed"... the article here cites a professor saying we just have to live with it, but it would be also interesting to see if anyone had leads on removal or any sort of mitigation/protection/neutralization schemes.
I just googled it. PFAS are simply emitted into the atmosphere and then brought back, rain precipitation being one method of "atmospheric deposition" (something to google). i.e. water doesn't need to evaporate with something in aerosol suspension for that thing to be found in precipitation.
The PFAS that show up in rain get there by also having a vapor pressure sufficient for atmospheric transport. They evaporate and condense with the rain. These chemicals aren't Teflon itself but other polyfluorinated molecules, used as intermediates in Teflon product production or for other purposes.
> Mercury, a naturally occurring element, is released into the environment through a variety of natural processes and human activities, including mining and coal-fired power plants. "Mercury is a global pollutant," said Weiss-Penzias. "What's emitted in China can affect the United States just as much as what's emitted in the United States."
> As atmospheric mercury rains down on oceans, it is converted by anaerobic bacteria in deep waters to methylmercury, the most toxic form of mercury. Upwelling brings some methylmercury to the surface, where it is released back into the atmosphere and carried by fog. At high concentrations, methylmercury can cause neurological damage, including memory loss and reduced motor coordination, and it can decrease the viability of offspring.
> "Fog is a stabilizing medium for methylmercury," said Weiss-Penzias. "Fog drifts inland and rains down in microdroplets, collecting on vegetation and dripping to the ground, where the slow process of bioaccumulation begins."
Can be purified. Activated charcoal filters are not the most efficient solution, but work reasonably well and can be easily built in an off-grid environment
> In order to make activated charcoal with all its nooks and crannies, regular carbon sources are transformed in one of two ways: either physically or chemically.
> In physical activation, wood, coal, or any regular carbon source is first heated up to 600 to 900 degrees Celsius (1000 to 1600 degrees Fahrenheit) in a chamber filled with inert gas. The inert gas ensures that the carbon doesn’t burn. Instead, as the carbon is heated, any impurities left on it are vaporized and removed, leaving nothing but pure carbon.
> Next, the pure carbon is exposed to oxygen or steam baths at even higher temperatures. This causes the carbon to fracture and form the fractal shapes with their extremely large total surface area.
> In chemical activation, raw carbon sources are mixed with an acid, base, or a salt. The mixture is then heated. Chemical activation takes less heat and less time to achieve the end result, which makes it the method of choice for large scale activation.
What bothers me though is that our environment is changing so much and so fast that homo sapiens could not emerge tomorrow like they did first. No way a primate without culture or science is going to regularly scramble a charcoal filter to drink water.
According to a trial in nicaragua, from memory (google it), 25%-50% salt solution; soak the charcoal (which is crushed to the point of not filtering too much through whatever filtering mechanism you're going to use) for 24 hours; let dry in the sun (plenty of sun in their trial, i assume baking is the same). (Can't remember if they rinsed).
I don't know what a bannable offense on HN would be, inciting violence perhaps? Wishing harm upon certain groups? Either way, I'm not sure we need to invite it if they already say it's over the line and not suitable. If we can have a civil discussion then obviously I'm with you that everyone should have their say... but that wouldn't elicit a ban.
Or at higher risk from having access to medicine and doctors. The overuse of medicine as the solution to everything is causing a lot of harm. A pill for every ill. In the US, it's not uncommon for people to be taking 7 different pills at once! I don't think people lived like this 100 years ago.
100 years ago people sat in rotting whale carcasses to cure their ailments[0]. People have actually always taken weird crap for whatever ailed them because we’re pretty fragile creatures with many afflictions. I’ll gladly trade dying of simple cuts and strep throat for modern medicine, even if I have to take 7 different pills at once.
There isn't a human alive today whose blood is free from PFOA and/or PFOS. The question to answer is what are the major routes by which this is happening.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread about cookware. The problem is that these chemicals are now found throughout the environment and used in countless products. The stuff is found increasingly in drinking water and foods. Maybe cookware is a major contributor, but the truth is nobody knows yet.
Nor does this effect appear limited to liver cancer. The paper notes:
> Studies examining associations of PFAS exposure with risk of other cancers, such as kidney cancer, in the general population have found similar associations to those reported here. For example, in the only existing nested case-control study examining the prospective association between PFAS levels and risk of renal cell carcinoma, PFOS levels >50 μg/L were associated with more than two-fold increased risk of developing renal cell carcinoma (OR=2.51; 95% CI: 1.28-4.92), and similar associations were reported for PFOA and PFHxS [[52]]. These findings are notable due to the similarity in PFOS concentrations associated with risk of HCC in our study. ...
For its part, the paper never mentions the word "cookware" and is instead focused on the link between blood concentrations and cancer.
Edit: Wikipedia has the following paragraph on the topic of cookware:
> Despite DuPont's asserting that "cookware coated with DuPont Teflon non-stick coatings does not contain PFOA",[91] residual PFOA was also detected in finished PTFE products including PTFE cookware (4–75 parts per billion).[87] However, PFOA levels ranged from undetectable (<1.5) to 4.3 parts per billion in a more recent study.[48] Also, non-stick cookware is heated—which should volatilize PFOA; PTFE products that are not heated, such as PTFE sealant tape, had higher (1800 parts per billion) levels detected.[92] Overall, PTFE cookware is considered an insignificant exposure pathway to PFOA.[93][94]
There's been a significant increase in the U.S. [1], though there are multiple possible causes. Besides environmental pollution, two factors often quoted are increases in viral hepatitis and obesity, which are both risk factors.
I think in the future people will view all the pollution and toxins in our environment as crazy (and avoidable) as we view people working directly with mercury or lead in the past. It’s just nuts that we can’t find the will to say that it’s not ok to pollute.
The usual line that I've heard on nonstick pans is that the leaking process happens at very high temperatures. In general one shouldn't use very high heat on a non-stick pan & certainly not an _empty_ non-stick pan.
David Chang's podcast has an interesting episode on this specific topic, though he brings on a domain expert who definitely has a lot of bias (but expertise nonetheless).
With two major caveat that make it way less practical:
- those tests aren’t against ageing pans. To be the safest, you’d need to buy pans on a short cycle
- chipping is still dangerous (physical degradation, including regular wear)
Basically, there is a specific case (new, perfectly intact, low-regular temperatures only) where it’s probably safe, and everything else is potentially harmful.
They are testing 6 different types of PFAS, and only 1 is statistically significant.
They need to be using the Bonferroni Correction because they are checking multiple hypothesis. To do that, you divide the required p-value (0.05) by the number of tests (6). If you do the Bonferroni Correction, none of the PFAS is statistically significant.
Whether they need a correction depends on how they calculated the p-value. If they only ask one question, "Is the total of these 6 chemicals correlated with liver cancer?" then they only did one test and don't need to correct. The fact that 6 chemicals go into the total doesn't mean they asked more questions, it just means there results only speak to the total amount of that whole class of chemicals in the blood rather than any one of them.
I’m curious, what’s so hard about it? I find they’re much easier because you never have to worry about using stronger tools - soap & a Brillo pad will take care of almost anything in seconds and you can use a metal scraper for the worst whereas I had to throw out our last “non-stick” pot because some fruit adhered hard enough to take the coating off. The main thing I keep in mind is that Teflon is only really better for maybe the first year - it’s so fragile that you’ll spend most of your time with inferior results and bonus health worries.
There is a cult around seasoning cast iron but those people are lunatics. It’s like adding an audiophile for buying advice and then saying a home setup isn’t a good idea because the moonrock needle costs too much. Clean it, cook a pound of bacon every few months, that’s it.
I do nothing at all for mine. I cook eggs, pancake and sausage in it every morning. After, I run it under some water and scrape it with a spatula, then toss it on the burner for a few seconds to dry.
It's significantly easier than dealing with nonstick, which has to be carefully kept from touching anything metal on the inner surface.
It's easier to flip things like eggs on cast iron because I can use a thin metal spatula instead of a much thicker, nonstick-safe plastic one.
If I manage to get something crusty on it I can use the green scrubber pads or even steel wool, which can't ever be used on nonstick.
If you think cast iron is harder you're really doing it wrong.
> After, I run it under some water and scrape it with a spatula, then toss it on the burner for a few seconds to dry.
I still can't get over how you guys think this is in any way sanitary. Not to mention that if any soap touches it you have to re-do the oil burning thing to remake the nonstick layer thing which isn't exactly practical, not to mention the seasoning thing. They're also rather heavy in comparison, not sure what kind of shape you're in that you manage to flip pancakes in one hah.
It's definitely harder than chucking the thing into the dishwasher for it to be washed with zero effort and maintenance. Scratches are also an impossibility with silicone spatulas.
There's no maintenance to do with nonstick pans. Take off shelf, use, put in dishwasher, put back on shelf, repeat. When all you use are silicone spatulas (because they are frankly the best kind of spatula) then there's also no danger of scratching them.
Here, I'll help. Having had both, the cast iron was a massive pain in the ass, and the nonstick pan takes literally no effort to not fuck it up. I don't have a cast iron anymore. I still have nonstick pans.
Cast iron is also very heavy, and hard to clean if you get anything stuck to it. You can’t really soak or wash it with soap/water without re-seasoning it or it’ll rust.
It has its upsides if you put in the work. I’ve given up and opted for mid-range non-stick (coated steel and/or copper, not anodized aluminum) or high end stainless.
Not being able to use soap is a myth, and re-seasoning a pan hardly ever needs to be done unless you're seeing bare metal.
After a hard scrubbing, put it on the stovetop, drizzle a small amount of oil in there, and high heat for a minute. Push the oil around with a paper towel. Your pan won't rust.
Use a metal scrubber and you probably don't need to use soap in the first place.
The idea of maintaining a seasoning on cast iron frying pans is too much of a pain in the ass. I wash it with soap and water and use olive oil or butter whenever I need to. The cognitive load is minimal and I don't have any usability issues.
I frequently soak and wash my cast iron. It retains seasoning and won’t rust so long as I dry it after. I also will typically coat them with a very thin layer of oil, but haven’t found it to be strictly necessary.
That said, I have mostly transitioned to stainless.
I use water and soap every day cleaning mine. If you get something really stuck you can heat the pan up, then add hot water to it. It basically boils the stuck stuff off. You just need to be careful not to crack the pan.
I barely have to clean mine anymore. When something does get a bit stuck, I just boil a bit of water in it and it comes right out with a light swipe of some chainmail.
Yup. Chefs rarely use nonstick cookware outside of baking or specifically making omelettes. For the majority of their uses, it's either stainless, cast iron, or enameled cast iron.
Non-stick got its foothold when the feds went on their "fat is bad for you" kick. They took all the fat out and added sugar to products to fix the texture.
Proteins stick to steel when the steel isn't sufficiently hot before food is placed on it. If you toss a bead of water into a pan and it doesn't dance along the surface in the Leidenfrost effect, your pan isn't hot enough.
> Chefs rarely use nonstick cookware outside of baking or specifically making omelette.
Citation needed? It sounds implausible to me that a majority of professional cooks seek to make their own job harder when they've got seven other dishes to make by tending a nonnonstick pan.
As a college student with no idea what I was doing, I tried to stir-fry everything at maximum heat and would quickly burn food to a regular pan.
After I learned to be a halfway competent cook, I discovered most cooking methods don't stick at all! Caramelizing, braising, roux, simmering, on and on- mankind learned to cook with ordinary cookware, and all the classic recipes and techniques reflect it.
It's not a matter of being a great cook - you simply don't need nonstick to braise or simmer, for example. So I'd phrase the exercise of learning to cook with steel pans as simply "learning to cook".
These pans are only not nonstick if used incorrectly. Carbon steel is often used in professional kitchens which develops a nonstick coating called “seasoning”. And if stainless is hot enough, it’s also not very prone to sticking.
The main reason I know of is that a nonstick coated pan will not survive long with the bulk way they wash their dishes. You'd also have to keep a separate set of non-metal spatulas and such.
The issue is that I want to cook with far less fats, not enough for cast iron to be viable. On top of that, it's easy to get cast iron to leach with acids and in some cases the seasoning can also be toxic.
For those looking for an alternative, carbon steel pans are stamped or spun from steel sheets and are seasoned like cast iron, but are typically thinner and have longer handles. These have been a game changer for my home cooking and I never heard of them until recently. I highly recommend getting a small one for your morning eggs. De Buyer is a popular high quality brand.
The seasoning of pans is also a cancer risk in some cases. The seasoning is basically a polymer you're bodging together from random organic chemicals in your food.
yea.... its a shame cause i love cooking in my cast-iron wok....
one alternative i use is to heat the oil but not to smoking (also use an oil with a high smoke point) on low heat for a couple mins, swirling around, then dump the heated oil, then cook on a low heat from there... its quite non-stick and it reduces the oil content in the food and hopefully reduces carcinogen risk as well...
another thing is to just use water (plus maybe a small trickle of oil) as a non-stick agent (though its hard to reproduce a lot of recipes this way) for fish/meats and vegetables if you can get away with it
Health issues aside, speaking as someone who uses only carbon steel and stainless steel cookware, I still wouldn’t recommend it for most people. It’s a lot of work just to maintain and learn how to work with these pans.
That being said, I love how much more forgiving, durable, and long lasting these pans are compared to Teflon coated pans and I’ll never go back.
I'm a novice and find it easy to maintain. There's no need to clean it extremely well between cooks, just with tap water and your fingernail. Some small amount of leftover seasoning is okay.
Just don't buy nonstick. It's not necessary and there are better alternatives. Use cast iron (vintage/used pans are cheap and great!), carbon steel (Blanc Creatives), enameled cast iron (Le Creuset), or stainless steel (All-Clad or Viking) . I cook eggs in all of these and it's not difficult. You don't need nonstick for anything... it's not more convenient at all.
So, what's the solution nowadays? Is the cookware really the greatest source of these chemicals in the human body when properly used? It seems like lower hanging fruit is avoiding Teflon dental floss, "compostable" straws/bowls, cosmetics, using an activated carbon water filter, etc.
I use a Stainless Steel pan with no coating for cooking, and a microwaveable glass for drinking. Worst case scenario would be some excess nickel from the cheap alloy that they use for the steel.
For folks having issues with food sticking to cast iron or carbon steel, try learning to cook on stainless. It's much more prone to sticking, but if you can get the technique down well enough to not have eggs stick on stainless then switch to cast it's a walk in the park.
There's also blue steel, which I think is just a fancy carbon steel. We have a crepe pan made out of it, and the crepes never came out oily. Truth be told, it doesn't get much use anymore. But it was definitely the easiest for crepes.
I saw "Dark Waters" [1] years ago and found that whole thing really horrific but I kept cooking with a Teflon pan until this week because I figured the process and result are distinct things (honestly how many industrial processes today don't have nightmarish byproducts...). Just this week though my pan totally died though and I happened to have this really beautiful cast iron pan with a ceramic handle of exactly the same size, so I switched. It takes a little bit of learning but so far I love it. It retains and transfers heat way better than whatever the Teflon pans I've been buying are made out of. Also I think the weight helps it make better contact with the plate (electric stove.) This YouTube playlist [2] pretty much sorted me out, combined with Adam Ragusea's video [3] I just happened to see a while ago (If you're a nerd you should watch his channel anyway.)
I read about PFAS years ago (didn't have teflon cookware then). Eventually a friend of mine gave me their old non-stick pan set. I had forgotten about PFAS, then re-learned about them and heard about their effects and pretty much instantly threw all the pans away. I bought three ceramic/cast-iron pans and haven't looked back.
Not to create further panic but you should know that the bright coloured paints in the enamel of those ceramic/cast iron pans will often contain lead and/or cadmium, which are both carginogenics. The whole thing is obviously sealed but who knows what happens when they chip.
As far as I see it with my paranoia hat on, there are only three safe options:
1. Cast iron unseasoned (and you do the seasoning)
2. Stainless steel (w/ no coatings)
3. Borosilicate glass (with no painting or markings)
Flossing with Oral-B Glide was associated with 24.9% (95% CI: 0.2–55.7) higher levels of PFHxS
Exposure to these chemicals and draws attention to coated cardboard prepared food containers and dental floss as modifiable sources.
Fast food packaging show that fluorinated chemicals are detected more frequently in paper wrappers than in paperboard containers.
Eating food prepared with nonstick cookware had no significant association with PFAS levels.
I use ceramic coated pans most of the time. I do have cast iron stuff, but my wife or I wouldn't want to use it every day as we both work. We cook every day, and being able to put it all in the dishwasher is a big time saver.
I also doubt that the polymer coating due to seasoning my cast iron stuff is kosher in terms of carcinogenesis, so another reason not to use it too frequently.
In general, organic stuff + very high temperatures are always a potential source of all kinds of nasty molecules. So, we try to limit this kind of cooking for the weekends.
I have been using oil infused Ceramic cookware from Calphalon (Classic). The handles are made of stainless steel which stays cool despite all the cooking. Quite convenient. Works very well as a replacement for Teflon based non stick cookware I used to use earlier. It's not perfect but using a bit of butter or oil when cooking gives good results.
Teflon will prove to be one of those planetary scale "Oops, we poisoned everything, everywhere, to sell cheap pans" mistakes, like tetraethyl lead in gasoline.
Anyone know how I can replace a non-stick wok? Carbon steel doesn’t work unless you have gas. Induction and electric hobs don’t heat up the sides enough to maintain the seasoning of a wok, which has very high sides.
I would rather not use non-stick coatings but I can’t find a good alternative.
You get PFAS from things like paper straws, and other paper dishes (always ask for plastic dishes, not paper). PFAS is also in waterproof coatings, and things like oil for the bottom of skis.
Cookware is the last thing you should worry about as far as PFAS.
I don't think so, since it's found everywhere like in your water and meat. In fact, focusing on cookware seems to understate the issue and leads people to just argue about which pan is the best while missing the point.
I'm sure it was editorialized by TFA because cookware is more concrete for readers to latch onto than "PFAS", an initialism people are only learning about this week.
It does not look cool but vapor cooking is a miracle. It is fast, it is clean, it preserves nutriments. People who like to "cook" don't like it because they can't perform their magic rituals. Cooking has always seemed something very religious to me... Cooking some stuff for a long time, adding secret ingredients supposedly to give "extra" taste... Putting stuff on the pan, then turning on the oven jsut to melt a layer of cheese.. Seems to be so much work, so little efficient.
Most of my cooking talents consist in adding salt and pepper, spices, olive oils, seeds, lemon juice to good produce with delicious bread. You can taste the things you are eating, it takes less time and it's healthier. It's even healthier for your indoor air. Come to the bright side.
I have a bad feeling millennials and gen z people are going to have a dramatically lower life expectancy than the previous few generations from how many chemicals they are in contact with
I think there is very little meat on the bone here. Possible? Sure! Certain? Hardly.
Of course we’re going to start turning up chemicals in our bodies that weren’t there before we started using them. And the increased prevalence guarantees that they will be there more often when you look for them in people with e.g. liver cancer. But so what?
And taking about a rate of a disease is easily confounded by more frequent and more sensitive testing.
Likely this is just in the very large bucket of studies that pick up spurious correlations. But like all of them - maybe it’s not spurious!
I've not heard of GreenPan before, so I took a look at their website [1]
There is not a whole lot of information available on their site.
From the Thermolon™ page[2]:
> ...contains zero harmful chemicals.
> PFAS, Lead, Cadmium, etc., are not put into it.
> Thermolon is based on a derivative of sand that is transformed into a sprayable solution through a sol-gel process. Zero harmful PFAS chemicals are involved in that process.
Great, but what chemicals are used in their products? What do they ACTUALLY put in the coating?
Why trust a company like this? If you're worried, then just learn to cook and use cast-iron, copper, stainless steel.
I own a few GreenPan products and started to wonder so I did some digging - seems they were subject to a class action lawsuit [1] which was voluntarily dismissed since it reached settlement[2].
Hard to know if it had much merit since it was unsuccessful though.
Teflon is the most biologically sinister chemical.
We need to hold the entire petrol-chemical industry to account.
A dear friend of mine is the niece of one of the most successful board members of Shell. Shell is likely the most corrupt-environmentally-speaking companies on the globe. (history of
When we went to dinner, they were sharing all their big-game hunting trophy pics from Africa where they were able to kill endangered species and had no qualms about sharing their exploits (think the EDIT -- it was Don Trump jr. (I totally dyslexia-'d the presidents sons, I did not do that on purpose. Sorry Hunter. (Crack is whack) Hunter Biden pic with the tail of a rhino/elephant? type pics. and it wasnt just one... NUMEROUS animals.)
OMG - I was on a flight with one of the biggest lobbyists in DC for the sugar industry.
This lady opened up to me about just how evil that industry is, and how the family emmigrated to the US via cuba by falsley claiming they were religious refugees and needed to establish a foot-hold in miami (but they werent cubans, they were criminals, and she spoke about how she helped set this family up and how she manages their accounts)
Y'all may not think there is money laundering on every level - but there is.
The sugar industry run by this family is unpluss-good.
Seriously, While travelling SE Asia, every single rice field from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan.... etc.
It was REALLY common to see the petro-chem signs in the fields advertising the petro-chemical compound's name brands. (I couldnt read local languages and the 'English' name brands were not what we have here, so they didnt form a stark imprint... But the root OEM was mostly Monsanto et al ptrochems.
The point being, and this will be controversial, but its true:
There are a much higher % of trans/gay folks in these rural communities whereby the entire water table is permeated with petrochems. and their water, while treated, is still victim to contaminants of the petro chems in the water. (Its all about the Endocrines)
SOURCE: My FIL was the civil-hydro engineer for the largest water plant in Mindanao Philippines. His son was on the board of the "rice consortium" (I cant recall what it was called -- the governmental agency concerned with ensuring that everyone in the PH has access to rice as the main staple foodsource, and more about pesticides. Think of NASCAR branding of vehicles. (like Shell Oil) - but now imagine PESTICIDE branding of rice farms... with label signs for the pesticides being used.
Recall when Indian farmers were committing suicide over GMO seeds that produced no yield and they killed themselves before they could starve to death?
So I got rice production and water production information from these two engineers... And the dots were compelling.
Its the same type of contamination the fish are receiving from SunScreen.
A relative of mine also made a career in the petro-chemical industry. He never denied climate change but the idea of environmental protection is completely alien to him
My mother always told me that coatings on non-stick cookware were carcinogenic.
She also told me the following (which I follow but never actually fact-checked):
- When doing dishes by hand, make sure to always rinse the soap off completely.
- Do not consume hot water straight out of the tap; always take it out cold and boil it as a separate step (because hot water carries more lead and other metals from the inside of the pipes?)
- Do not eat burnt (or partially burnt) food (carcinogenic).
- Avoid cooking with seed oils or other polyunsaturated oils - These are good raw, but not heated as it breaks the bonds in the oil and turns bad. For cooking, use saturated fats (but mono-saturated fats like olive oil are OK too).
- Avoid processed foods as much as possible (and chemicals such as coloring agents and preservatives).
- Avoid eating too much instant noodles (due to coating on noodles).
- Avoid soaps and shampoos which produce a lot of foam (avoid sodium lauryl sulfate and cocamidopropyl-betaine).
- Avoid any medication which affects the brain.
- Make sure that bedroom gets plenty of sunlight during the day to prevent dust mites.
- Don't over-sanitize your environment; lack of exposure to germs can lead to allergies?
- Rinse your mouth out well after brushing teeth (don't consume too much fluoride).
- After taking antibiotics, eat yogurt and/or probiotic supplements to rebuild gut bacteria. I was told this long before research about gut microbes was mainstream.
- Avoid eating too much predatory fish like Tuna (mercury).
- Swimming in the sea is good for you. It has healing properties?
Anyway, kind of random but I've always wanted to share these in case it helps anyone. I do think it helps to be cautious even when the science is limited or has gaps. Our modern society tends to err on the side of reckless consumption instead of cautious consumption. Remember, the financial incentive of all companies in a capitalist system is to deny all downsides because it mitigates legal liabilities. Think of Big Tobacco 'doctors recommend smoking' campaigns in the 1930s to 1950s; it makes sense to assume that every industry we have today is similar. So the science (which is funded by these companies) will always be biased towards neglect ("don't worry, it's totally safe and effective") rather than caution ("It's probably safe in small quantities but you may want to avoid it anyway just in case"). The media will never promote the second approach.
I think electromagnetic radiation is the area where I'm most reckless because of smartphone, laptop, WiFi Router... It's hard to avoid. But on the plus side this is probably one of the most well-researched areas with fewest gaps. The only uncertainty for me concerns what amount of electromagnetic radiation is safe but I guess quite a lot.
So there is ionizing radiation, and non-ionizing radiation.
The worst that non-ionizing radiation can do to you, is burn you. Just like all stoves, an induction stove is non-ionizing radiation. So just like all stoves, it can burn you (if you touch the steel pan). Even the heat from a flame is non-ionizing radiation.
Microwave ovens also use non-ionizing radiation -- specifically, they use sub-infrared light -- AKA, radio waves. In your body, there are molecules that due to their shape & constituent ions have a dipole moment (water being the most prevalent example.) The dipole moment causes the molecule to vibrate, i.e. heat up in the presence of an E-M field. This is exactly why sunlight feels warm: it is jostling the dipole-momented molecules in your skin. The only reason microwaves are "scarier" than sunlight is, meat is translucent to radio waves, so microwaves -- despite being less energetic than visible light -- can heat up the inside of you where there are no pain receptors.
Then we have ionizing radiation, like UV, X-ray, Gamma-ray, etc. Ain't nobody cooking with those.
TL;DR don't worry unless you're standing next to an unshielded kilowatt radio transmitter.
I've heard people advocate for _not_ rinsing toothpaste out of your mouth after brushing and while the premise seems sound (gives flouride more time to work) it just sounds nasty.
Not drinking hot water is mainly about Legionnaires disease. To reduce exposure to lead from contaminated piping, you must wait until the sitting water is flushed out before using it for consumption, however this does nothing if the entire piping is lead, you have to replace it.
You should throw away nonstick cookware from before 2013, but new nonstick cookware sold in the US does not have PFOA. I believe the EU followed suite recently.
Edit: After doing more research based on many comments here, I realized I was wrong. The brand Teflon replaced PFOA with GenX, a different fluorosurfactant that's probably worse than PFOA. From what I can tell, fluorosurfactants are more or less required to make PTFE and it seems quite likely that all fluorosurfactants are toxic. Personally I choose to use Teflon for eggs and stainless or cast iron for everything else. That feels like a decent trade off to me comparing years of life lost from liver cancer to time spent scraping scrambled eggs off of pans.
I want to add that a lot of cool startups are working on PFAS remediation. One I know of is Cyclopure, they make a Brita filter replacement that filters out PFAS (it's very expensive at the moment, though). Probably worth it if you live near a chemical plant, airport, or US military facility (airports and military bases both use PFAS fire-extinguishing foams which they typically fail to contain).