Yes absolutely! Still doing the dietary things for her. She gets to have hot baths though, and wear tight fitting underpants.

FYI anyone else reading, if you have a boy Teflon is really something you should avoid.

I'm duplicating this text higher up, lest it be buried deep in the argument below:

> At normal cooking temperatures, PTFE-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity.

> Only few studies describe the toxicity of PTFE but without solid conclusions.

> There are some reports where PFOA was detected in the gas phase released from the cooking utensils under normal cooking temperatures.

> Due to toxicity concerns, PFOA has been replaced with other chemicals such as GenX, but these new alternatives are also suspected to have similar toxicity.

> The toxicity and fate of ingested PTFE coatings are also not understood.

Source:

PTFE-coated non-stick cookware and toxicity concerns: a perspective

Muhammad Sajid 1, Muhammad Ilyas 2

PMID: 28913736

DOI: 10.1007/s11356-017-0095-y

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28913736/

Somewhat frivolous comment, but naming a material GenX hardly says to me "trusted and proven safe". It sounds like the backstory to a mutant movie.

I wonder if it's Teflon in general or damaged Teflon pans - many people do not used them correctly, overheat them and have damaged coatings that leak chemicals.

You can go check perfectly fine pans having 1-star Amazon reviews "Pan sticking after a month!".

Here's something interesting to think about.

Did you ever hear of a canary in a coal mine? The miners would take birds in with them to alert them to dangers gasses. If there were dangerous gasses he bird would typically die before the miners did. This is because the bird has very high performance lungs so that they can supply enough oxygen to beat their wings quickly.

You basically can't own a bird in an appartment and cook with teflon cookware or run the self clean setting on the oven (they are teflon coated inside) because the fumes will kill them.

That last paragraph does not seem to be true. Well only if you're an "an absent-minded person" according to:

https://www.petcoach.co/article/teflon-toxicity-ptfe-toxicos...

Do you really think that people who own nonstick pans are only using them a low and medium settings as the article recommends? Or that most apartments have a vent hood for the stove? Something they don't mention is that the FDA also recommends throwing out nonstick pans made before 2013 (I think that was the year) because the older pans emit more fumes and at lower temperatures.

Sure, if you're extremely careful about using it, it's possible. That's why my previous comment wasn't absolute. But the majority of people I've known who use them seem to treat the pans poorly and cook with them at all temperatures. Many times they only own nonstick pans (who has space for multiple sets in an appartment?), and use them at all temperatures.

That's literally what my first comment was saying :) It's kind of crazy how widespread this issue is though.

I've read this all over the internet but my parents had a bird live very well past the expected bird lifespan and modified nothing about their normal habits (using teflon pans, cleaning the oven, etc) the entire time. The bird's cage was like 15 feet from the oven. Just a single anecdotal data point but I think the risk is extremely overblown.

Interesting.

I see the risk as being in the level where I choose not to use teflon pans, but not extreme enough to ban it or force others to follow my choices. I think the environmental impact from the manufacturers is a bigger concern that should be monitored more closely. I think they have a Netflix documentary about one place in WV. Of course the company switched to a new (largely untested) chemical for new coatings. Just a shell game to stay in compliance or public favor, like with BPA vs BPS.

I agree that for the average Joe, it is a waste of effort to try to get bans enacted. That time is much better spent doing research (or contracting a trusted qualified person to do so) and then enacting changes in the space they personally have agency over.

I'm just saying that I don't think it's right people to tell other what to do unless it has some direct and well demonstrated impact to the rights of another. As long as the manufacturers are correctly controlling the waste, then I don't see why banning it would make sense. Sort if like some people choose to smoke cigarettes- that's their choice.

In my experience, Teflon will always be scratched. Yes, in theory you could "use it correctly", but nobody ever does. So it's better to simply not have them.

Whats a good alternative? The ceramic ones?

It may be difficult to get to happen in your relationship, because at least for me, my partner is insistent on using non-stick pans. If you have to have non-stick, ceramic or hard anodized are much healthier than teflon, although they aren't as non-stick so require some adjustments to cooking style.

The best things to use are cast-iron and cladded stainless steel. With both, you heat the pan more slowly to reach your appropriate temperature (you're looking for leidenfrost) and then you add oil, and cook. If you use healthy oils and heat before adding the oil, cast-iron is effectively non-stick once a seasoning develops and cladded stainless steel won't stick except with specific foods (eggs). But this is definitely a different methodology for cooking than most people are familiar with.

The other benefit of using non-teflon pans is you can use all types of utensils.

Just want to share what I learned from personal experience:

Don't give up on winning over your partner's mind. It may take a little while, and you have to be patient, diplomatic, and gentle. People are resistant to change. But it is not hopeless, and it is worth it in the end, because their health is at stake.

Personally I just use cheap and simple solid stainless steel cookware, and scrub aggressively. Chainmail scrubbers work well for really baked on stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Knapp-Made-CM-Scrubber-Stainless/dp/B...

I used to have teflon cookware. It's great in theory. But in practice, I find indestructible stuff that you don't have to baby works much better for me. Of course, if you don't have much upper body strength, other approaches may work better.

Traditional cooking techniques [1] make use of the browned bits anyway, you don't get this as much with non stick cookware. I don't find stainless steel pans too hard to clean.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deglazing_(cooking)

I remember how the first time I tried to make beef stew it tasted terrible. Then I tried browning the meat first...

In my experience, anything plant-based comes off readily with just a good soak, unless it's been burned on to blackness.

I have used cast iron for decades. Never once had to scrub them.

Hot water in a hot/warm pan has always worked for me to keep them clean.

Stainless steel for most things (can't make eggs/pancakes though, they'll stick). Preheat the pan before using. After cooking, warm up some water in it and scrap away the stuck bits with a wooden spoon (or make a pan sauce).

Cast Iron or High-Carbon steel for steaks, eggs/pancakes, stir-fries (wok). You will have to maintain a non-stick seasoning and that has a learning curve, most people don't get it right at first. Make sure to always dry them as they can rust.

You can look at enamel or copper if you have the $$$.

Ceramic pans will always fail after a short bit of time. Cook's Illustrated has yet to find one that can pass their durability tests.

That said I wish they'd test the Granitestone Pro as other reviewers have said the Granitestone holds up better than other ceramic pans.

I use two ceramic pans which are still as good as when I got them 10-15 years ago from a brand called ecosafe. Not all from the set made it, one got ruined by overheating.

Stainless is durable, but I suspect there are issues with chemical reactions between the food and bare metal.

I think that enamel is the best, being inert and durable, and old technology, though you also don,t want to drop or overheat it.

Cast iron is also good, just unwieldy and difficult to clean if you,re cooking meat, eggs, cheese, basically animal proteins.

> one got ruined by overheating.

My primary use case is high heat wok cooking. A lot of ceramic woks exist, they just don't last long!

Ceramic are OK, but nowhere near the non-stickiness of teflon. Some pans are the first couple of times you use them but lose it real quick.

Carbon steal is my daily pan now (lighter than iron skillet - it's what chefs usually use). Once you get a good coating of fat built up it's pretty decent non-stickiness, but you have to take a lot more care of it.

I wish teflon was more healthy because it's damn good for cooking with, especially scrambled eggs.

Traditional skillet

Enamel

Ceramic

Cast iron

Stainless steel

In that order, in my opinion.

You left out the two I’ve been considering, hard anodized and high carbon steel. Any reason why?

We've switched to carbon steel from cast iron; while it's easy to warp the carbon steel (and we have), it still works fairly well on our electric range. The seasoning is just as good as cast iron. A heavier high carbon steel pan might avoid the warping issue, but ours are all pretty thin.

I just wrote down what I could remember and have experience with.

I don't buy frying pans, so I take what I can get.

>Teflon will always be scratched

AFAIK this is a non-issue because teflon is inert in its finished form. It's only an health risk during manufacturing and when it's heated too high.

Sorry, but your knowledge is incorrect. Teflon breaks down and leeches into food at commonly encountered cooking temperatures.

claiming it "leeches into food" is a stretch. Wikipedia says even after reaching 500F it sublimates to fluorocarbon gases. I wouldn't want to be near it, but it's not exactly leeching into the food either. It's also unclear whether the fluorocarbon gases have the same effects on the human body as PFOA.

If you want to gamble with your health while the jury is still, technically, out, I can't stop you...

> At normal cooking temperatures, PTFE-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity.

> Only few studies describe the toxicity of PTFE but without solid conclusions.

> There are some reports where PFOA was detected in the gas phase released from the cooking utensils under normal cooking temperatures.

> Due to toxicity concerns, PFOA has been replaced with other chemicals such as GenX, but these new alternatives are also suspected to have similar toxicity.

> The toxicity and fate of ingested PTFE coatings are also not understood.

Source:

PTFE-coated non-stick cookware and toxicity concerns: a perspective

Muhammad Sajid 1, Muhammad Ilyas 2

PMID: 28913736

DOI: 10.1007/s11356-017-0095-y

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28913736/

> At normal cooking temperatures, PTFE-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity.

I don't think it means what you think it means. Reading further into the paper, it says

>At normal use conditions [< 230 °C], total emissions of PFCAs were 4.75 ng per hour

Which seems absolutely tiny. If spread out the emissions across the hour (because the 4.75 ng figure was cumulative emissions), the exposure to the cook would be in the parts per trillion range.

I guess it's all relative and a matter of opinion...

4.75 nanograms may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that, at 414.07g/mol it is 6,908,293,060,000 parts of the stuff, it seems like quite a bit to me. And that's in just one cooking session.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since my chemistry class.

The EPA drinking water standards, the ones watered down by industry influence, are measured in parts per trillion.

Here is a science question for you: If the EPA limit for PFOA in drinking water is 70 parts per trillion, what volume of water would need to be mixed with 4.75 nanograms of PFOA in order to bring that water to within the allowable limit for drinking water?

Now, here is a quote from the EPA:

> These studies indicate that exposure to PFOA and PFOS over certain levels may result in adverse health effects, including developmental effects to fetuses during pregnancy or to breastfed infants (e.g., low birth weight, accelerated puberty, skeletal variations), cancer (e.g., testicular, kidney), liver effects (e.g., tissue damage), immune effects (e.g., antibody production and immunity), thyroid effects and other effects (e.g., cholesterol changes). There is limited information identifying health effects from inhalation or dermal exposures to PFOA or PFOS in humans and animals.

Based on this question, do you think there are any "health effects" if exposed to PFOA and PFOS below these "certain levels".

>4.75 nanograms may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that, at 414.07g/mol it is 6,908,293,060,000 parts of the stuff, it seems like quite a bit to me.

This doesn't prove anything part from molecules being really small. What's more important at what doses do negative health effects materialize.

>And that's in just one cooking session.

I'm not sure about you but 1 hour is an usually long time to be using a frying pan. Unless you're cooking a huge slab of meat, letting anything sit in a 230C degree pan for an hour would result it being burnt/overcooked.

>The EPA drinking water standards, the ones watered down by industry influence, are measured in parts per trillion.

Looking through https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/national..., the only one that I can find that's near 1 part per trillion is dioxin, at 0.03 PPT. The rest are well above that. Furthermore, even 1 part per trillion is a high estimate for actual exposure. In addition to being spread out across an hour (3600 seconds), the emissions are also dispersed across the room and vented out. Finally, like I pointed out earlier, what maters more is the toxicity of the compound. Dioxins and PFCAs are both "bad", but it doesn't mean they're equally as toxic. The limit for mercury is orders of magnitude higher at 2 parts per billion.

Googling for "epa pfoa", I found this page, where the limit is listed as 70 parts per trillion:

https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/drinking...

Did you get a chance to take a crack at the chemistry math problem I posed?

Once you've solved that one, here is another one for you:

If 4.75 nanograms of the material is aerosoled out into the air, what amount is absorbed directly into the food which is cooking on the pan?

Based on random website I found googling, it starts to break down and release PFOA around 300F, which is easy to achieve if the pan is not filled with water.

Do you have your units mixed up? Wikipedia seems to have a different range:

>While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene

I used a different source than the one you link. 500F is not difficult for a frying pan to reach either.

The same Wikipedia page also reads:

>Pyrolysis of PTFE is detectable at 200 °C (392 °F), and it evolves several fluorocarbon gases and a sublimate.

My completely unscientific, unsubstantiated guess, based purely on obsessively researching food safety for years, is that it begins to leach at a much lower temperature.

> I used a different source than the one you link. 500F is not difficult for a frying pan to reach either.

Most vegetable oils smoke before 500F. If you're just frying up an egg or sauteing some vegetables you'll be fine.

>The same Wikipedia page also reads:

The sentence after it:

>An animal study conducted in 1955 concluded that it is unlikely that these products would be generated in amounts significant to health at temperatures below 250 °C (482 °F).[

Without reading that study, who it was funded by, how it was conducted, I choose to err on the side of caution. In other words, I don't believe that statement for a microsecond, especially coming from 1955.

>I don't believe that statement for a microsecond, especially coming from 1955.

but you're willing to believe unsourced statements based on your own intuition?

I provided a credible source in another reply to your comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238226

But yes, I'll side with my intuition when it comes to my health and those dependent on me.

Just because someone says the gun is not loaded...

who the heck is getting their pans to 260C? ? ? Frying eggs... it only needs to get so hot?

A lot of people just don't treat their eggs well.

Huh, all my trousers were coated in teflon when I was growing up. It was a prominent selling feature.

So are pizza boxes and microwave popcorn bags

And the same stuff is in waterproof coatings and easy clean carpet coatings and other such things.

Good parenting is forcing your boy children to take cold baths because you need their sperm to carry on your legacy.

There are better options.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/710/124/9ce...

Cold baths is a bit far, but pouring a bucket of cold water over them has many health benefits, including immune function.

To clarify my comment, this is done with gentle reassurance and playfully, not as any sort of hazing or abuse, purely for health benefits.

It is common in many cultures in eastern europe and elsewhere and the health benefits are well known.