PFAS is nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. There is no safe level in the human body. It is toxic in the single-digit parts per trillion. And yet, we allow them to be added in massive quantities to our cookware, dental floss, and clothing. EPA is currently in the process of collecting feedback for its PFAS regulation. Attend a meeting and tell them to ban this nasty toxic garbage.
“Oh boo hoo I have to scrub my stainless steel pan a little harder cause I don’t have a Teflon pan any more.” You know what, when you don’t die of cancer at 60 due to lifelong PFAS exposure, you’ll thank me.
PFAS is the tobacco of our time, with deep-pocketed industry interests lobbying hard and spreading FUD about the risks. Let me be extremely clear on this point: It is toxic as hell and it will kill you dead in horrible, horrible ways.
> “Oh boo hoo I have to scrub my stainless steel pan a little harder cause I don’t have a Teflon pan any more.”
Stainless steel, while typically being derided by many home cooks for being "hard to clean", is actually quite pleasant to work with if used properly. What does that mean? Well, I've discovered that it means you should start with high quality pan (I use All-Clad BD5 and Copper Core, though there are many other good options too), heat it up fully before adding anything to it, throw in some fat and wait a few seconds for it to heat sufficiently, then add your food. Keep the heat up while cooking (good pans help with this part a lot).
If anyone is curious about the science behind this and why you should add the fat/oil to the pan when the pan is hot, rather than when it's cold, it is primarily around creating conditions for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect
If you do this correctly, even eggs can be prevented from sticking on stainless steel pans. The extra advantage for stainless steel is it can be cleaned back to like-new condition relatively easily and without significant concerns over /how/ you clean it. You can even use acids to clean stainless steel to polish it to a shine like vinegar or lemon juice, without damaging the metal in any significant way.
When you add the oil doesn't matter for cooking as long as you let the total pan-oil system get up to temp before you add the food. Leidenfrost is used as a quick indicator that the empty pan is the right temp, but oil doesn't do a leidenfrost effect.
The advice to pre-heat the pan first is because if you forget an empty pan on the stove you get a hot pan, if you forget an oiled pan on the stove you get a grease fire.
Also try out carbon steel for a more nonstick type situation. Stainless is best when you want some sticking, like for building a fond for a pan sauce. Carbon naturally seasons similarly to cast iron, but much lower maintenance because you can wash it however you want and essentially rebuild the seasoning from scratch for each use.
> When you add the oil doesn't matter for cooking as long as you let the total pan-oil system get up to temp before you add the food. Leidenfrost is used as a quick indicator that the empty pan is the right temp, but oil doesn't do a leidenfrost effect.
1. It matters because oils oxidize rapidly (and can begin breaking down) in the presence of high heat. You want the oil to be relatively fresh while using it to cook. This is less of an issue with highly refined oils, but a problem with most natural oils.
2. Oil isn’t affected by leidenfrost, but the food you are cooking is. This effect prevents the food from falling below the oil layer and sticking/burning to the pan when the oil is moving due to water boiling off. When water molecules in the food come in contact with the surface of the pan below the oil, leidenfrost forces them to float back above with the food and allow oil to flow back into the space.
Moving food as you cook it helps with this as well. If you cook at the wrong temperature without this effect, oil gets displaced from below the food and it sticks. This is especially difficult with very wet foods with minimal structure like eggs.
Sure leidenfrost is a fine model to use when thinking about food sticking to your pan and preventing it etc. It still has nothing to do with when you add the oil though.
No cooking oil is going to appreciably oxidize in the 70 seconds it takes to heat a pan. I cooked at very high levels for many years, I have seen a cook get fired on the spot for handling a pan incorrectly, no one cares about whatever oxidation is happening during preheating. The advice to add oil to the hot pan is so you don't forget and overheat the oil, or start a fire.
It takes much longer than 70 seconds to heat up a 12 inch stainless steel or carbon steel skillet on a home burner to a point where it can be used to fry an egg or sear a chicken thigh, both of which are things a home cook may do with some frequency.
Oil by itself won't spatter, that's caused by water cooking off. Butter will spit because it's got water in it. Reused fry oil and things like that can also, because they tend to have some fried food bits holding moisture still in there. But just pure oil no.
It depends on what temperature you mean by "hot" and which oil you're referring to. If you're in the band of temperatures in which water produces the leidenfrost effect you are at a good temperature to add oil, if it's too hot you'll know and if it's too cool you'll know if you test your pan with a drop of water before you add the oil and begin cooking.
Ah! Yes. Thank you. One thing I didn't mention is that I've seen this described by pro cooks like "you know when the pan is hot enough when water droplets don't merely boil off quickly, but instead dance around rapidly in the pan". Leidenfrost! TIL
I own a set of cheaper, but decent stainless steel pans.
However, I've never gotten scrambled eggs to work without just coating the entire pan in egg.
Scrambled eggs don't play nice with high heat, and too high heat and the butter will brown or just burn. I can absolutely coat the pan with butter, and the eggs still stick.
I'd he interested in some facts ? And cost/ benefit discussion? I know nothing about PFAS but the above comment reads like a lobbying screed. It sounds like PFAS has been in use for a long time. The above makes it sound like people are dropping like flies left and right. There must be a reason why it's still on the market and used widely.
> I know nothing about PFAS but the above comment reads like a lobbying screed.
If you knew nothing about smoking and read a long rant on smoking's health effects, would you dismiss it as easily as you dismissed this one? Probably yes -- but you would be deadly wrong.
It's interesting to me how people, although saying they know nothing about a subject, they still have opinions about what's true or false on that subject. What can one say about something they know nothing about except: I don't know. Maybe: "this opinion (GP's) seems aggressive, is it warranted? I don't know". Just say: I don't know.
> The above makes it sound like people are dropping like flies left and right. There must be a reason why it's still on the market and used widely.
Smoking was dropping people like flies left and right. And indeed there was a reason why it was still on the market and used widely.
You must have misread my comment.I gave no opinion because as I said I know nothing about PFAS. I certainly didn't say my mind was made up and I wasn't going to do any further research. To the contrary I was asking for facts and cost benefit analysis. For instance what are the alternatives and what are their environmental and health costs? OG did not address any of that.
PFAS are used in so many different applications it would be difficult to list the alternatives comprehensively. But it can be confidently said that, health and environmental costs aside, there are no better alternatives for their current use. Which is a huge part of the problem (similar to the BPA/BPS issue).
PFAS in DWR / water resistant applications is being replaced with silicone-based tech and some other novelties.
PFAS in coated paper goods can be replaced with silicones, sulfuric acid baths, etc.
PFAS in machinery could be replaced with food-grade lubricants like mineral oil, etc. (or just more frequent cleaning)
Give me some other common applications and I'll help think about the alternatives
This is an opinion. "screed" and "lobbying" are not neutral words, they have negative connotations.
>The above makes it sound like people are dropping like flies left and right. There must be a reason why it's still on the market and used widely.
This is also an opinion. It uses hyperbole to cast shade on GP's original words, to imply a dreadful scenario that should be happening if those words are true; you then say, paraphrasing: this scenario is not happening, so then it follows GP's assertions are not true (to be clear: this is your inference, implied, not mine).
This is how I read your comment; I admit, I might've gotten wrong and I apologize if that's the case.
Definitely emotional, but overall right I think. A good place to start is the documentary "The devil we know". I think you'll come to the conclusion that what has happened here has been inexcusable.
PFAS is a huge family of long lasting fluorinated chemicals. The ones that are bio-absorbed typically are liquid at normal temperatures. Gasoline and plastic are both hydrocarbons, but gasoline is toxic and long chain polyethylene is not. So we are sort of in this state where some Hacker News savior is shouting “hydrocarbons dangerous!!!”, when the story is more like liquid PFAS is a problem, but Teflon is safe like polyethylene is safe. Don’t drink hexane, but the 200-ane found in polyethylene won’t be absorbed even when you eat it.
Bottom line is that all the liquid PFAS has been pulled from the market. The last thing I have seen was some ski racing wax had these liquid PFAS compounds, and they got fined pretty heavily.
Since it seems many of these chemicals takes hundreds if not thousands of years to break down, I think it's safe to say that the benefits of making them illegal outweighs the costs.
If you're an older adult with high ferritin levels (genetic or oterhwise), you should avoid cast iron. High ferritin has been linked with hepatic injury, cancer, and a other endocrine disorders.
See https://irondisorders.org/too-much-iron/
I'm heterozygous for a hemochromatosis gene and my ferritin is elevated (although not nearly as much as if I were homozygous). I give blood every month to maintain normal ferritin levels.
I'd never thought about my cast iron fry pans as a source of dietary iron. Obvious in retrospect.
I don't have the alleles, _but_ the test is designed for western Europeans (and specifically shows up often in people from Ireland.) There are some candidate alleles for East Asians, but nothing concrete yet from LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics.
I donate blood using apheresis machines (i.e. the "2x" RBC) when possible, since I need to hoard my plasma for other another health condition.
After using cast iron for years, I bought a few de Buyer carbon steel pans and I love them. They're thinner and lighter than cast iron. They're more responsive to temperature. They season better than cast iron and are incredibly non-stick. They might be a bit more sensitive when it comes to care than cast iron though, and are certainly a lot more expensive.
I still use my cast iron cookware for times it is appropriate, but highly recommend carbon steel as well.
If you're accustomed to non-stick pans like i was, there may be a learning curve using carbon steel (at least there was for me). I bought a nice set several years ago and they ended up in a box in the basement after i failed to season and wash them properly. My father in law recently dug them out, revived them, and gave us some tips. We have been successfully using them ever since! While I still enjoy using the non-stick, I found i was missing out on proper fond all these years.
I'm never, ever, ever going to be able to convince my wife cast iron is any good. This is because we have cast iron pans, and she's tried to use them, and finds them entirely terrible. Yes, we've done all the fiddly seasoning and such. I'll cook in them, but she hates the things.
Tiny chance I'll be able to convert her to stainless for most things, but we're never not going to have one teflon pan for eggs and crepes and such.
I have a de Buyer carbon steel omelette pan and it is completely non-stick once seasoned. Way nicer for eggs than a cast iron, maybe she'd be open to trying that. I also have one of their crepe pans that we use for tortillas and dosas, check those out too.
We're about due for some new pans (the worst non-health-related thing about teflon is that they're much more a consumable item than other pan types) so I'll see about snagging one or two of those, thanks for the tip.
This is the main reason I ditched them. Carbon steel is my primary pan type now. When you're breaking in a new pan use just a little bit of butter for stuff like eggs. I use more oil than butter but just having a little amount present helps.
I'll echo this. One thing I learnt is that metal scourers, used judiciously, are perfect for cleaning a well seasoned carbon steel pan. Basically, the scourer pulls off the few bits that catch on the pan and if you don't really scrub (which you should never need to) the seasoning is robust enough. Just remember to not cook anything acidic (for which we use stainless) and try not to leave things in the pan for ages.
Basically, remove the beeswax layer, then rub a layer of oil on the pan and heat it until it fully smokes off. You can do it on a burner or in the oven at 450F. You'll do that a maybe 3-5 times on a new pan, up to you. They tell you not to do carbon steel in the oven because of the material of the handle, but I've done it before and it worked out fine. I generally just use the stove top because it's easier.
You clean the pan with soap and water as you would any other pan, and then towel dry since you don't want rust forming on the metal. You'll need to re-season it every so often depending on how much use the pan gets, but that's usually only every couple years.
Anytime your solution to a problem is "Just exert more effort and skill and do it correctly", there is a 100% chance the general public will not adopt your solution.
The worst is when I see this advice used for backup policies.
Like, the backup is there to save your ass when you don’t do things correctly. If the backup needs you to exert more effort and do things correctly, then it’s most likely to be broken when you need it the most.
I'm still struggling with conveying, "you have to get the stainless pan hot and lay down some fat before you add the food, or it will stick". Add the tendency of cast iron to unpleasantly flavor acidic foods (which is lots of foods) and it's hopeless, as far as convincing goes. At least stainless doesn't do that. I might win her over for stainless, mostly, but cast iron's going to remain only for me.
No denying that it's a lot easier to make eggs or pancakes or whatever on teflon, while distracted by also trying to get the kids dressed and such, without ruining the food or making a mess, than it is on other materials. Even if you know what to do with other pans, you still have to do it, and that takes more attention and care than teflon.
If it comes out that teflon pans are, in fact, a major source of ingested or inhaled PFAS, I'll probably kick up my efforts to convert her. In the meantime I suspect a lot more of it comes from other household materials (clothes, carpet, furniture—plus stuff in cars) that've been treated for fire and stain resistance, so I'm not super worried about the pans.
You need stainless for acidic foods. We have both types of frying pans. The problem with Teflon as I understand it is that it breaks down to PFAS at temperatures that are easy to reach in a frying pan. It might be that Teflon other things are better (like a stand-alone grill thing), but I just try to avoid it.
I'm still struggling with conveying, "you have to get the stainless pan hot and lay down some fat before you add the food, or it will stick".
Would she be willing to use a timer? She can just set it for 10 - 15 minutes after turning the burner on, and avoid putting anything in the pan until after the timer is done.
I've certainly ruined my fair share of eggs by rushing, but having the patience to let it get up to temperature is pretty much the only "hard" part of using cast iron.
lol, well I was erring on the side of caution because she's clearly doing something wrong here. That being said, in my experience, 5 - 10 minutes is about right unless I go out of my way to preheat at a higher temperature.
I think I'm legitimately an egg cooking expert at this point. I've cooked eggs in 1000 different ways on different pans. There's no comparison - a non-stick pan is going to trivially handle eggs, regardless of how your pan is oiled, the heat, etc, whereas a cast iron is only going to do a decent job if you're cooking eggs in a few specific ways and you take care to control temperature and oil.
If the non-stick pan is brand new, yes. The problem is that you need to replace them every couple of years as the coating become degraded or they perform worse - even if you religiously use only soft utensils, simple use and cleaning will break it down.
Unless you’re trying to avoid using oil for some reason, there is no time savings.
This isn't my experience. Low heat (which is how you should be using them) and soft utensils (I prefer to use those anyway) should be enough to keep it going - I have no scratches or wear on mine that I've noticed, though I did just replace them. They're quite cheap so replacing isn't really onerous either.
> Unless you’re trying to avoid using oil for some reason
I don't want my eggs to be particularly oily, or if I'm explicitly making a buttery french scrambled eggs I want to use butter and I want to add it in later, not use it for lubrication/ stick. You'll need much more for the cast iron.
It's also pretty trivial to get right. I'd use carbon steel just because it can heat faster. I can have my pan ready to go in 2 minutes of heating. Use a bit of oil (sometimes I mix in a tiny bit of butter to help nonstick, but it isn't required) and it's good to go. The difficulty is extremely exaggerated. I've not had a need for nonstick
If I'm cooking bacon, then I baste them in the hot bacon fat. But mostly I like to put enough olive oil in the pan so that I can easily baste the eggs with a soup spoon. Salt, lots of pepper, and baste 'em -- the tops solidify just enough not to run.
Seriously, the single time I've made eggs work without having a layer of stuck egg at the end, in cast iron, was on this immaculately-maintained ancient cast iron pan in an AiBnB on a Mennonite farm, and even that only worked because I cooked them in a bunch of sausage grease, probably amounting to 10x the fat I use in teflon (butter, in that case).
But, I usually make scrambled, and you need tight, lowish temp control for those, which is one thing teflon really excels at (cast iron and stainless need higher temps to prevent sticking)
Could I ask why she has an issue? I've heard some people have had problems with them but as someone who was born and raised on cast iron I've never really understood.
More care & technique required while cooking to keep things from sticking or burning, the seasoning and iron itself flavors acidic foods so the pans aren't as nearly-universally-useful as teflon, can't put them in the dish washer, cleaning in general becomes a kind of balancing act between leaving soon-to-be-rancid fat on the pan (which will flavor your next dish) and stripping the seasoning (you can't just clean everything off, completely, like you can with teflon or stainless).
If it comes off easily in cleaning, it’s not seasoning. It’s much easier to clean or cook on cast iron than Teflon for that reason — nothing short of power tools or an axe will render it unusable the way you can do with Teflon.
If this were as true as cast iron fans claim, teflon wouldn't have dominated home kitchens for decades, I expect.
I do cook on cast iron, but even the absolute very best cast iron pan I've ever cooked on (not mine—I get the cheap stuff, this was one of those perfectly-smooth beautiful hundred-plus-year-old pieces that'd been cared for quite well and was seasoned better than I've ever managed to get any of mine, despite trying every method that can be found online) wasn't as easy to cook on or to clean as teflon.
They beat teflon at searing and toasting (e.g. nuts or whole spices), mostly because teflon can't safely be heated to temps needed for those, but anything else? Very best case I've ever experienced, almost as easy to cook with and clean as teflon, worst case, way, way worse. Plus you've gotta keep acid away from the cast iron if you don't want your food to taste of iron and/or old polymerized fat, which really limits its utility.
[EDIT] It occurs to me—maybe people who find cast iron about as easy as teflon just cook extremely-different cuisine from what I do? I tend to do a lot of one-pan and sauce-and-starch-in-skillet stuff that's often hell in cast iron, if not just wholly inappropriate for it due to the acid levels. If way more of my cooking were steak-and-hard-vegetables dishes, say, I might wonder why people bother with teflon.
There’s also a cost factor: a Teflon pan will be considerably cheaper, and most people don’t factor in the service life. Once you’re used to something you usually replace it with the same thing.
The other trend was Nixon pushing low fat diets. By the time actual scientific results debunked that, a generation of Americans had adjusted recipes to avoid using as much fat as you need to cook optimally in cast iron and it’s still common to find people using techniques which pretty much require non-stick.
TBH I think it's less the pan and more the kitchen. Growing up I thought cooking in a cast iron was a pain because I had a really shallow sink, weak water pressure, and I cooked for my family so dishes would pile up.
I live in a place with extremely strong water pressure and a very deep sink, plus the faucet is one of those rope ones that can be held arbitrarily. It rips through anything on the cast iron, leaving it clean in under a minute. Cleaning is, in general, much much much faster in my new place - plus I have a dish washer so dishes don't pile up, only the cast iron (or some specialty knives, maybe) generally needs to be washed in the sink.
I cook a lot of sauces in the pan and it's all good now that I have the room and tools to clean it off.
It’s really not nearly as bad as you’ve made it out. Put some salt in the pan, rub it down, apply a thin layer of oil and good to go. Is not some occult ritual.
I use both, I have a cast iron, a carbon steel, and a non-stick.
The truth is that the non-stick is the most non-stick of the bunch when compared across all things you could cook in a pan. Sometimes I just want to reheat my pasta quickly and uses a quick splash of water and a paper towel to totally clean the pan.
I am a total nazi though about making sure metal never touches the non-stick. It always gets cleaned and put away in its special spot immediately after using it.
Stainless steel just really isn't the same thing or used for the same purpose. It is an important type to have available but I wouldn't cook eggs in them for example. Better to use a carbon steel or cast iron so I can just cook in it and not worry about stickage.
You mean enameled cast iron? We've got a big pot like that, great for things that need to go in the oven, not just on the stovetop, but it's damned heavy so I don't tend to use it unless I have to.
[EDIT] Oh, googling, yes, we do also have a ceramic-coated steel(?) fry pan still kicking around, though I almost never use it because the non-stick was never great and got worse fast. Teflon better if I need non-stick, stainless better if I don't and also don't want to have to baby the pan.
I want a multilayered pan: magnetic stainless steel on the bottom, then aluminum, then carbon steel. Basically a modern high quality stainless steel pan but with the top layer being carbon steel instead.
This ought to combine the lower weight and superior heat distribution of a multilayered pan with a seasonable cooking surface.
Most of the benefits, much lighter weight. Highly recommend having one or two in your inventory. Serious Eats has a good review of options: https://www.seriouseats.com/best-carbon-steel-pans-7093873 (as well as seasoning guides and an overview)
>Highly recommend having one or two in your inventory
I love how this comment implies that the average household will have more than 2 pans/skillets in their inventory let alone one or two of a specific type.
If you're a chef with a bunch of pans, one or two of them probably should be carbon steel.
If you're someone with one or two pans total, you should probably replace the one or two of those that's likely Teflon with one or two carbon steel ones.
I’d recommend stainless for the average cook. Carbon steel requires more maintenance and clearly the general public doesn’t want to do that. Stainless is awesome except perfectly slidey eggs require a bit more effort and that’s the trump card a lot of people use, unfortunately.
I’m looking for a new pan and leaning towards stainless. I cook a lot of eggs. Friends of mine who also cook a lot of eggs use them with no problem.
From what they say and what I’ve read, including in this thread, the “bit more effort” needed is simply to make sure that the pan is at the right temperature before adding oil/butter and eggs. This is testable using Leidenfrost effect on a water droplet. The eggs should also be taken out from the fridge 10 minutes before cooking.
Watch Julia Child's videos on cooking omelettes. The technique works in every kind of pan and the eggs are always super slidey. That's what I love about learning more about cooking... there's always some alternate method to get what you want. (Julia's stuff is always great because she would spend weeks just to figure out the best way for the home cook to cook something)
Carbon steel will rust quicker, it's still susceptible to seasoning breakdown from acidic foods, and it's more expensive, but it's lighter so it's easier to sautee with.
Unlike a lot of other materials there's not that much difference between high and low quality carbon steel pans. Even the good ones don't hold much heat and tend to warp, it's just part of how they are.
They're pricey because they're out of mainstream favor and are kind of an online cooking fad niche thing right now. The main producers are venerable european ones with their own particular markets.
But if you have a local dollar store type thing catering to an immigrant community from like west africa, southeast asia, south america, you can probably snag a carbon steel pan for like $12. It may be a wok or comal or some other slightly unfamiliar format but it'll work fine.
Overall it does look like this class of chemicals should be entirely phased out, although finding materials with similar capabilities might be a bit of a challenge. Carbon fiber perhaps?
> "The EPA report confirmed that GenX is associated with harmful effects on the kidney, blood, immune system, liver and development. The EPA also linked it to an elevated risk of cancer (suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential). EPA’s proposed health threshold, called a reference dose, for GenX is in the same range as EPA’s reference dose for PFOA (0.00008 mg/kg/day for GenX versus 0.00002 mg/kg/day for PFOA)."
The plastics industry is producing dishonest PR material on this issue - this one is from a site run by "The Plastics Industry Association", claiming that GenX and other 'alternatives' don't have the same health issues:
> "After the removal of PFOA and PFOS, companies developed alternatives to these long-chain fluorinated substances that perform the same tasks without the same environmental or public health risks. All of these replacements are safe to use according to governmental agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the EPA."
Whenever I consider a town to live in, I google {town name} + {ewg}. The Environmental Working Group has water analysis for pretty much the entire country. Eye opening and terrifying.
It’s nasty stuff sure, but you’re not consuming PFAS every time you cook with Teflon pans. Your pans are fine. In fact, it is actually very difficult to consume PFAS consistently in a way that will actually do long term harm. In the end you’re more likely to die of cardiac arrest from the fatty foods you cook than from PFAS cancer. Saturated fats used for non-stick cooking will clog your arteries with plaque and kill you off eventually, guaranteed.
My advice, don’t worry about it and live your life.
Let me put it this way, you can break flakes off of PTFE pans and swallow them and nothing will happen to you. They will just pass through your digestive system. You will not get some kind of cancer just from this alone. Don’t listen to the lobbyists.
but how do you avoid it completely? "Hazardous PFAS chemicals contaminate the drinking water of up to 110 million Americans and the blood of nearly every American."
How on earth can I find bottled water that doesn't contain PFAS in it?
and chances are it's aleady in my body.
1. Are the chemicals of heat breakdown the same as what's being described in the article? I find it strange that everything teflon related is lumped under "PFAS/PFOA", from precursor chemicals[1], the coating itself, its combustion products, to various other applications (eg. firefighting foams or paper takeout containers)
2. The "high temperatures" in this context is above the smoke point of most cooking oils. As long as you're not using it for high temperature applications (eg. searing meat), you're fine.
Starts to break down at 500F which is below the smoke point of avocado oil (520F). It’s objectively easy to hit these numbers on a pan, especially if you leave it for a few minutes one time.
Wikipedia [1] says: "Non-stick coated cookware has not been manufactured using PFOA since 2013."
The source they reference [2] says:
> So is teflon safe now?
> Absolutely. PTFE is inert in its solid form and will most likely pass through your digestive system with no issue. In addition, the temperatures used for cooking aren’t typically hot enough to release PTFE fumes into the air – though toxicologists are quick to remind people that overheating Teflon coated cookware is a bad idea.
The source they reference, a dead-but-archived page on the University of North Carolina's website [3], says:
> Assuming you use your cookware appropriately, i.e. not heating it excessively and unattended, always heating the pan with something in it, not scratching off the Teflon and consuming it for dinner, using non-stick pans is relatively safe for humans. Risk of “Teflon flu” due to inhalation of fumes during typical kitchen use is minimal. Ingestion of PTFE is not reported to be toxic and residual PFOA in PTFE-coated pans is minimally transferred to food. However, long-term exposure studies to PTFE-fumes and PFOA have not been conducted so we can’t say that it is completely safe. Regardless, you should keep Larry the bird away from the kitchen.
> If you wish to avoid the Teflon risk altogether, stainless steel and cast-iron pans are recommended alternative, albeit not necessarily non-stick, cooking options.
So it seems to me that it should be fine, though as a layman, I can't determine the veracity of the sources.
Honestly, none of the language you're quoting is reassuring. There are qualifiers like "most likely" and "relatively safe", and the not-at-all-reassuring "Ingestion of PTFE is not reported to be toxic". This is very different from "known to be non-toxic". So many industries (in the US at least) operate in a way similar to "shoot first, ask questions later". When it comes to health, it should be the reverse.
Clearly they sold the original formulation as safe, until it wasn't, so why trust the new formulation? To me, it's not worth the gamble when we're discussing a new chemical that's being transferred into all of my food. There are plenty of alternatives with a slight decrease in comfort but the benefit of having been tested for hundreds (or thousands) of years.
I don’t much care if others give themselves cancer via PFAS by lifestyle choices, as long as they’re aware. To that extent, I try to raise awareness by telling people, since a lot are not aware yet.
The fact that others using PFAS impacts us all, since it is distributed into our environment and stays there an incredibly long time, is what makes this issue worth regulating. Similar goes for many other ecological issues (e.g. microplastics).
Since there's nothing we can do at the moment to stop money-grubbing companies from profiting from microplastics at our expense, it looks like donating plasma may reduce PFAS levels in blood by 30% per year:
Blood transfusions from younger people in remote countries where seafood consumption is low can also be a good option. Nepal seems to be a viable choice for anyone considering it.
80 micromolar is a ridiculously high level to test at. I’m really tired of studies doing this. The public doesn’t understand molarity and that the concentration of almost anything is toxic at 80 uM.
The 80 uM amount used in this study is 7272x higher than the highest amount we would expect in the blood.
This isn’t to say that PFOS isn’t bad, it is bad but this looks like the standard university PR department nonsense and researchers using ultra high concentrations looking for a positive result. Honestly this looks like something I would expect an undergrad to do that doesn’t understand concentration.
Not exactly the same, but reminds me of the saccharin rat studies. Massive dosing (the human equivalent of ~800 diet sodas per day!) plus a physiology that highly concentrates urine led to bladder cancer in rats. Turned out to be completely irrelevant to humans (and now ironically saccharin may be somewhat cancer fighting?).
For expedience many of these studies are done at the Maximum Tolerated Dose, which is the amount that does not otherwise outright kill the subjects. It’s understandable that this is useful for magnifying sensitivity but it also leaves them with a tinge of doubt. That compounds with the career benefit for publishing sensational results to generate some bad science (especially frustrating when there are tinfoilers looking to distrust science as it is).
I believe that the concentration of the solution they were suspended in was 80 uM, but the concentration in their blood isn't mentioned (and probably wasn't measured) in their work. I'm not a zebrafish expert so I have no idea how much PFAS would a zebrafish absorb from its surrounding solution into its bloodstream.
Yes, but your original comment talks about a concentration of 6 ng/mL in human blood, while the researchers only point out the concentration of the surrounding medium. Perhaps I'm missing something, but you can't compare these two values since you didn't measure the actual concentration of PFAS in the blood stream of the larvae. For all we know it could be lower than 6 ng/mL, right?
They are also doing studies on human neutrophil cells etc. at 80 uM. The fluid above the cells at 80 uM is a model for cells in blood.
You can see in Figure 5 here that the effects are really only seen at the highest non physiological doses. Even their lowest dose of GenX is 2.6 uM which is 2600 nM. I don’t have data for blood levels of GenX but if it is like PFOA that would be 260x higher than any concentration we would expect a neutrophil to ever see. And there is no effect on respiratory burst.
I would like to see regulation that continues to allow more beneficial uses of PFAS while restricting the high-exposure, low-benefit uses.
For example, your phone screen is likely coated in a very very thin, factory applied coating of large molecules that are perfluorinated at one end and covalently bonded to the glass at the other end. It might even be applied by a CVD or similar machine without the use of solvents. It makes the screen easy to swipe and much less smudge-prone. And there is very little of it, and only the tiniest amount is likely to come off in your fingers.
Compare to essentially any anti-fog goggle spray. You spray it and probably inhale it. And it is made out of soluble PFAS [0] that don’t stick very well to your goggles, and you put those goggles on your face, and probably get some of the chemicals in your eye and nose, and then you do it again and again. (Seriously, what’s wrong with gel toothpaste for this application? Good old sodium lauryl sulfate is an excellent defogger, and any gelled version sticks to glass or plastic well enough for a long swim, and the entire formulation is extremely non-toxic. And in the tiny amounts needed for goggles, it doesn’t even irritate eyes.)
PFAS are everywhere, and it’s uses really do vary widely in how problematic they are and how useful they are!
There’s a problematic trend of picking a chemical or two to complain about and having the industry make an effort to avoid that particular chemical, even if there is no reason to expect that its replacement is better.
For example, BPA in polycarbonate is being replaced with very closely related compounds that could be worse. And companies are apparently replacing PFOA and PFOS with “GenX”, the compound found to be problematic here.
Every time I see something “BPA-free” or “PFOS-free” I shudder a bit. It’s a worse-than-useless statement.
Non-stick cookware can kill pet birds even in other rooms of a house, at normal cooking temperatures. That should have been the canary in the coal mine that they aren't safe, but everyone except bird owners kept using non-stick cookware.
Anecdata, but I've owned a pet cockatiel for just over 20 years. He lives in a cage about 10-15 feet from the kitchen where we have never ceased using nonstick cookware. We're just careful not to let pans overheat, and careful to take the bird to another room when we are using a new pan for the first time.
Is there any source on this? There’s an other commenter saying non-stick cookware is actually safe unless you use metal on it or use it on high temperature. I don’t know what to believe anymore.
None of these sources are saying non-stick pans are toxic on normal cooking temperature. Actually, one of them says:
Most of these cases have been due to overheated frying pans within the household. At temperatures above 280 °C, PTFE-coated surfaces begin to emit degradation products in the form of particulates and gas.5,9 Subsequent inhalation of these by-products by birds can result in various clinical signs, including open-beak breathing, chirping, incoordination, lateral recumbency, convulsions, and death.
So I assume it's still ok to use at normal cooking temperatures.
The first thing any responsible bird owner will do is get rid of all teflon pans. Even a self cleaning oven will kill them. This has been well known in the bird community for years. It's the very first thing we'll tell a new/prospective bird owner. It's really as bad as "Cook a meal, all the birds in the house die."
It is SO hard to figure out if these "forever chemicals" are in your cookware, because companies actively hide information about their cookware.
(It's especially troublesome if you have parrots, because one overheated pan will kill any and all parrots in the house - and it's non-toxic for humans?? lol)
As one example, I bought some hexclad pans. They had very strong wording about their use of teflon:
A: Our pans are PFOA free but contain some PTFE. PTFE is in over 95% of all nonstick cookware including our ceramic-based nonstick. PTFE is safe and inert. In fact, it is used in surgical matches meshes, dental implants and heart stents which are all implanted in the body. We do not use PFOA chemicals and other chemicals that gave many other nonstick pans a bad name. Why do we use some PTFE? Sadly, non-PTFE nonstick cookware does not work well for long periods of time. In fact, in our tests, the largest non-PTFE nonstick in the world only held up for 45 minutes of consecutive use.
What's especially ridiculous is that the "good" hexclad sets you can get at costco also put this coating on the BOTTOM of the pan, against the flame or burner! High temperature is the achilles heel for these chemicals.
Caution aside, speculatively this could mean that the serious issue of PFAS contamination in American water supplies made the pandemic worse than it would have been otherwise. Obviously, even if the effect size is relatively large, this would be smaller than more obvious and direct contributors, but it's not nothing at population scale. It's really disconcerting to me that we spent decades using chemicals in everyday household products that are extremely unsafe in a myriad of ways, without even a warning, and we've effectively semi-permanently poisoned all of the major city water supplies in the US.
We seem to have the same attitude with all technologies. Be it a social network, a new type of AI, chemicals, fossil fuels or anything else really.
First we release the product because we can make money, then problems appear as adoption ramps up. I find it wonderful we're still around to be honest.
Now balancing progress with safety is something we're going to be debating for a few more centuries because no company can afford a thirty year study on a product to understand its long term effects on a population before production. So we're all the experiment.
Fossil fuels provide us with cheap energy and the drawback (C02 emmissions) can be dealt with via carbon sequestration.
Social media is alcohol for narcissists. It provides very little utility or value, and the drawbacks (depression, FOMO, etc) far outweigh any "benefit".
Ah yes, the famous carbon sequestration technologies we are efficiently applying all over the world right now which have entirely prevented any effects of climate change. Amazing job everyone! /s
I love how as soon as a technology appears which will allow us to keep using a cheap, dense, portable, reliable form of energy, the left-wing zealots come out of the woodwork to bitch and moan because it goes against their narrative and special interests.
Literally billions of lives have been lifted out of poverty due to fossil fuels providing cheap energy. As long as we continue to have an abundance of energy, the effects of climate change will be successfully mitigated.
People love to harp on fossil fuels but don't seem to want to admit that without it, everyone on the planet would still be suffering pre-industrial living standards and there would be vastly fewer of us.
If you study sequestration at all, you’ll find that it’s not going to be a silver bullet. It’ll be a small contributor, but reduction to zero is going to have to do most of the heavy lifting.
That seems self contradictory as you're telling us this via a social network. If there really is very little utility or value that would suggest your comment to be of the same nature, which should then prompt a question as to why you posted it. Ironically, narcissism could explain that, but the alternative explanation is that there is value there, we just need to be more careful with it than we have been.
Everyone wanted a pill to take but the proven answers to reducing adverse outcomes is to reduce air pollution, lose weight, do everything you can to get your heart into shape by sleeping well, eating well, reducing stress, and exercising.
Diet and exercise do not produce sustained long term weight loss for basically anyone. They fail anywhere from 80-99% of the time. That part is unfortunately bad advice. The only thing that’s been shown to do that is fasting, surgery or GLP-1 drugs.
Diet generally implies caloric restriction whereas fasting is complete abstention.
There are significant biological differences - for instance, when you restrict calories your metabolism slows down as much as 15-25% over the first three weeks (hence the plateau many dieters experience). Fasting on the other hand raises your metabolic rate up to ~15% for the first 5 days of a water fast. Further, production of HGH is inhibited by consuming any food and while fasting it can increase 3-12X. Autophagy is inhibited by the consumption of any protein (via mTOR).
If you want to treat fasting as the special case diet where input=0, I certainly understand that. However, the physiological processes of caloric restriction are quite different than total abstention.
> Caution aside, speculatively this could mean that the serious issue of PFAS contamination in American water supplies made the pandemic worse than it would have been otherwise.
There's no evidence to support that link - what is provable though is the fierce opposition of the GQP, the far-right and conspiracy preachers to mask mandates and even stuff as basic as vaccines.
The article, cautiously, provides some of that evidence. Anything that suppresses the capabilities of the immune system can be deductively reasoned to make pandemics worse.
If you read what I wrote though, you'd realize I'm acknowledging very clearly that other factors played a larger part, without trying to make this a pointlessly political conversation. So, please don't do that, it does not improve the discourse on HN.
Unfortunately, some of the candidate replacement chemicals are very likely to be as bad or worse, but because they haven't yet existed long enough for us to see population effects, we seem to be treating them as better until proven otherwise. PFBS and GenX were touted as being better than PFAS and PFOAS, and in fact now have been proven to be as toxic or worse, and the next generation of replacements now being touted are likely as bad (but yet to be studied sufficiently to state this conclusively).
Instead of looking for products that have certain modern conveniences that require these types of chemicals to manufacturer, I think a better path for people who want to avoid exposure is avoiding these types of unnecessary modern conveniences. There's nearly no reason to use a non-stick pan when cooking, there are many techniques to get nearly as effective cleaning and release from pans which are made from cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel without the health risks. There's nearly no reason to use spray waterproof coatings on clothing, when you can instead use inherently waterproof layers or buy clothing from natural fibers with tight weaves, or use traditional methods of waterproofing like wax treatments. There's nearly no reason to use almost any product you find in a cosmetic store because you can choose to simply wash your face regularly, use simple moisturizers and sunscreens (although sunscreen is its own chemical minefield), and go through the necessary mental conditioning to accept yourself as you are (which is generally healthy anyway).
I appreciate the link, but I wish people would do a better cost/benefit analysis when weighing modern conveniences that are enabled by disastrous population level and environmental consequences.
If you’ve not read it, you might be interested in The Technological Society. The author says, we ought not ask only “what’s the benefit?”, but also “at what cost?”
In the past three years or so, I’ve been making more and more conscious decisions to avoid conveniences and do things a more traditional way, because they work, and with more known side effects.
I wonder if there's a more formalised system of thought that amounts to 'only use what technology you actually need to achieve a goal' or 'use the lowest-tech solution that reasonably meets your needs'? Not exactly outright Luddism but a general reduction in eagerness to adopt new stuff unless you absolutely need to. I guess HN of all places isn't really the natural home for such a philosophy!
Interestingly today there was the PFAS pollution project [0] present in nationwide news [1] in Germany trying to give an extensive map of polluted spots. Many municipalities, and thus also the population, are unaware of the extent of pollution and its consequences.
If it's like similar cases recently (e.g. BPA) they're either still there, or have been replaced with some other less-studied product that may well be worse—not trading known-bad for known-good, but known-bad for... who knows.
[EDIT] Incidentally, there's nothing at all magic about microwave popcorn bags. You can just put popcorn kernels and a little oil in a paper bag, fold it closed tightly, and put it in the microwave. Stick a plate under it if you're worried about the oil getting on your microwave. Obviously don't fill it too full or it'll unfold and popcorn will get everywhere. Or use a wok with some oil (I like coconut oil—doesn't make it taste like coconut, mostly imparts a slightly buttery flavor) and cook it on the stovetop. You can use a regular pan but the wok is way better because it tends to keep the popped corn away from the heat while letting the unpopped kernels settle down where it's oily and hot.
Cordura is a brand name for a way of texturing nylon thread. Nylon is not made from PFAS.
Cordura often has a coating on the back to make it waterproof, usually polyurethane that is sprayed on—also not PFAS.
It may have a DWR treatment on the outside, which makes water bead up and run off. Many DWR treatments are made from, or break down into, PFAS. DWR coatings are far more common on clothes than backpacks, though.
You can test by spraying water on the fabric. If it immediately forms round little drops that roll off, like it can’t “touch” the fabric, you’ve got a DWR treatment. If the water sits flat or starts to soak in a bit, you don’t.
I loved „Glide“ floss for years because it worked so well. Was totally dismayed when I finally put together why it did. I‘ve switched to Dr. Tung‘s now which is made of natural plant-based materials and works even better than traditional flosses.
https://www.epa.gov/pfas
“Oh boo hoo I have to scrub my stainless steel pan a little harder cause I don’t have a Teflon pan any more.” You know what, when you don’t die of cancer at 60 due to lifelong PFAS exposure, you’ll thank me.
PFAS is the tobacco of our time, with deep-pocketed industry interests lobbying hard and spreading FUD about the risks. Let me be extremely clear on this point: It is toxic as hell and it will kill you dead in horrible, horrible ways.