Re:Stainless steel leaches nickel and chromium into foods du...
by adrian_b on Thursday March 10, 2022 @05:51AM
(#30625472)
About enamel, that is a complex mixture of various oxides.
All colored enamels have undesirable components.
White enamel can be made perfectly safe for food contact. Unfortunately, being white is not a guarantee for that.
Manufacturers are tempted to include in the enamel composition various oxides that improve the manufacturing properties, e.g. which increase the fluidity of the melted enamel, or which enhance the adherence of the enamel to the base metal, and so on. These additives may leach unwanted substances.
So one may use cookware with white enamel, if they trust that the manufacturer was not too greedy to reduce their costs.
Ideally there should be a law to force all manufacturers of cookware to publish the precise chemical composition of any material used for food contact, like there are laws for labels with the approximate food composition.
Until then, it is safer to distrust any kind of coatings, plastics, enamels or glazes with secret compositions, because in the past there were many bad surprises whenever any of these were analyzed.
All colored enamels have undesirable components.
White enamel can be made perfectly safe for food contact. Unfortunately, being white is not a guarantee for that.
Manufacturers are tempted to include in the enamel composition various oxides that improve the manufacturing properties, e.g. which increase the fluidity of the melted enamel, or which enhance the adherence of the enamel to the base metal, and so on. These additives may leach unwanted substances.
So one may use cookware with white enamel, if they trust that the manufacturer was not too greedy to reduce their costs.
Ideally there should be a law to force all manufacturers of cookware to publish the precise chemical composition of any material used for food contact, like there are laws for labels with the approximate food composition.
Until then, it is safer to distrust any kind of coatings, plastics, enamels or glazes with secret compositions, because in the past there were many bad surprises whenever any of these were analyzed.