What Microplastics Might Be Doing to Our Intestines https://now.tufts.edu/2023/06/09/what-microplastics-might-be...
Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/nanoplastic-inges...
Microplastics can stick in human airways, new study finds https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/microplastics...
Many BPA-Free Plastics Are Toxic. Some Are Worse Than BPA https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/many-bpa-free-plasti...
Plastic pollution is so bad for animals it now has a disease name — 'plasticosis' https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/research-ocean-plastic-birds...
Microplastics found in every sample of water taken during the Ocean Race https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/micropla...
Secret industry documents reveal that makers of PFAS 'forever chemicals' covered up their health dangers https://phys.org/news/2023-05-secret-industry-documents-reve...
Forever Toxic: The science on health threats from plastic recycling https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/forever-toxic/
Yet Another Problem With Recycling: It Spews Microplastics https://www.wired.com/story/yet-another-problem-with-recycli...
Tiny Polystyrene Particles Detected in the Brain Just Two Hours After Ingestion https://neurosciencenews.com/polystyrene-brain-23079/
60% of home ‘compostable’ plastic doesn’t fully break down, ending up in our soil https://blog.frontiersin.org/2022/11/03/60-of-home-compostab...
(... thousands others)
That said, it’s generally used as a coating rather than a structural element so there’s less of it in the environment.
Fluoride is the ion, but if you want to get pedantic, you're not adding the ion to toothpaste and drinking water - you're adding another fluorine compound which is dissociating in solution.
Ie, when you salt your food, you're not tossing in Cl- ions directly.
(sorry in advance for all who want to suggest iron skillets. I can't make them work in daily use.)
It's not that I don't believe you. It just doesn't work that way in my pan on my stove with my food at my skill level, at all. I gave up and buy nonstick pans and replace them every other year or so.
This process went fine, but I always had to baby the pan (had to be very careful cleaning it with said chainmail, very careful with what/how I cooked in it) and had to re-do the initial seasoning several times when it got too troublesome.
This process would leave the pan at a dark brown, and for a while I blamed this on not removing rust well enough before seasoning or not babying it well enough for it to build up to a ~normal black coat.
At some point during the early pandemic I tired of this. I decided to do something similar on the stovetop where I could observe/iterate better. Apply a coat, wait for it to stop smoking, and repeat until it was black. (plus a few for good luck; I didn't keep track; this took maybe dozens of rounds?)
I've had a much better time since then. The most ~babying I've done is applying a few fresh coats if I don't use it for a while or water doesn't bead when I rinse it.
I suspect it has to do with electric vs gas and being able to get and maintain a stable temp with gas. But that could just be a poor craftsman blaming his tools.
I bought a nice new range right before I discovered the air-fryer, and it now functions mostly as a device for holding up the air-fryer.
Plus, many people who are learning do not have the privilege of an experienced teacher. Relying on instructions, videos, and trial & error takes more time and energy for most people. I agree with you that it's worth the effort though.
It's similar to how my partner has a stainless steel pan that I avoid using because I have not had the bandwidth to internalize the right ratio of heat, time, and oil to cook things on it without burning/sticking, whereas they have no issue with it. It's a good reminder not to take internalized skill for granted.
The trick to not sticking on steel pan is just preheating it properly. A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick. Just let it get hot enough.
In that case I'm not sure what the exact mechanism was. But I know that after others have used/cleaned a seemingly well-seasoned pan I've had to deal with chips, flakes, and/or rust and had to go back through the whole annoying seasoning process. And of course it's entirely possible that despite carefully following instructions that I've done the seasoning wrong -- chemistry is the only class I ever flunked.
> A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick.
My partner made a similar recommendation. It sounds trivially easy but for whatever reason I have not managed to make it work. Given that cast iron (generally) works fine for me I've had minimal motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of another material, though I would like to give it another shot at some point.
I've talked to multiple experienced and home chefs about this disconnect and they've admitted two things:
1) cooking on a screaming hot pan is possible of course. It's how all professional kitchens work. But it's way harder! You have to pay close attention & the timing for error is very small. Cooking at lower heat on Teflon lets you make more adjustments.
2) After doing everything perfectly, and seasoning perfectly, for the same heat you ABSOLUTELY still need more of some oil or butter on a cast iron or stainless steel then you would for an equivalent Teflon pan. This is non-negotiable.
I say that partially as a joke but also it does sort of sound a bit absurd, in the sense that your cooking techniques are just sort of wrong if you are repeatedly burning food to your non-non-stick pan. You need an oil or fat on your pan to provide a buffer or to bathe the food in liquid.
Again this might be a balancing act of the negative effects of teflon consumption and consuming too much fat via oil.
You can cook a lot of things on a "non stick" telfon pan without an oil or fat.
You can cook far fewer things on a "non stick" cast iron without an oil or fat.
But the cast iron crowd will gaslight the rest of us, and claim that we are just seasoning it wrong but otherwise it is indistinguishable and only superior.
It's like manual transmission.
Now, I do think some of them are coming coated in silicone-based coatings. The consensus I get asking "are these carcinogenic?" is "probably not?"
But the other problem is determining what a particular pan is coated with: I have not seen a single manufacturer label their pan with anything more informative than that it is coated in "magic science stuff".
Also, I only use 'plastic' utensils with the pan. The result, not a single scratch on the pan. The surface looks brand new, I've been using it over a year.
maybe consider bamboo or wood or yknow silicone instead lol what is so appealing about plastic utensils?
i wonder if you're trolling?
imagine if i had not included silicone. your counterargument only serves to try to justify op's ambiguity
but who am i kidding? this is HN. you probably only care about feeling superior ;)
i didnt realize i was being so outlandish. hn is known for what i described. and yes i do hope some people learn to prioritize the actual result instead of wanting to beat others down with rhetorical skill. we're talking about affecting people's lives here, while representing to others that we have a clue.
That said, even oxides do break down when heated. Like, that's what smelting is...
Hm...
It's about as strong as most of the molecules on your body.
But I don't think that fluoride moving around is the problem. Looks like the problem is exactly the stability, and some long foreign molecules installing themselves in your body.
It states that PTFE is safe, whereas PFOA — what Teflon used to contain — was the component that made Teflon unsafe.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/is-teflon-coating-safe
> Now, since PFOA belongs to a large group of chemicals called PFAS, consisting of 4,700 similar substances, it might be tempting to just switch to one of the other PFAS chemicals that hasn’t been restricted yet. But that wouldn´t solve the problem, it would only postpone and perpetuate it. [1]
[1] https://marketplace.chemsec.org/articles/news/2020/04/01/the...
I.e. there's a whole zoo of similar compounds, and all those type specific safety claims are all at room temperature. The whole point of their use is often on heated surfaces, getting near and over the safety limit.
Your link does not contain a reference to PTFE and looking at the meaning of the acronyms should provide evidence fluorethylene is not a sulfonate or an octanoic acid.
The manufacture of PTFE may involve generating these as bio-hazardous byproducts and PTFE could be contaminated or even break down into them, but they are chemically not the same.
I'm not sure about the last claim: it isn't clear that all PFAS are equally bad, so replacing PFOA with a different PFAS might be worthwhile. It seems hard to study, but with Europe banning PFOA, perhaps we'll get some more insight.
Teflon is generally safe, but heating it to above 300 degrees Celsius or 570 degrees Fahrenheit poses a danger to your health.”
Note they didn’t say Teflon was safe at 299C, the risk is chemical breakdown not a phase transition like water which boils at a specific temperature and pressure. When used properly pans shouldn’t get anywhere close to that temperature range but it’s very possible to get to a dangerous temperature if there isn’t food in the pan.
Once you're frying, roasting, and grilling things at this temperature you are increasing cancer risk completely unrelated to any cooking materials involved. That's true of french-fries, bread, steaks and a zillion other things. It's why they're tasty (see Malliard reaction).
I certainly consider cast iron relatively safe, but it's polymerized unsaturated oil is likely to leach acrylamide and associated chemicals. It's just that compared to the food you're eating it's not relevant.
What frying pan when used properly doesn't get near 300 C? A pan surface temp of 200-250 C is nothing strange when frying a steak.
It’s the same gap was walking outside into 25f and 115f Aka below freezing to punch you in the face hot.
And table salt is made out of Sodium and Chlorine, one of which is explosive when mixed with water, and the other is used to gas soldiers in trenches if you're into committing war crimes.
What matters is what effect the particular chemical has when you put it through common household uses, not the effect of its constituent parts.
Anyway, uncommon household uses can also be a safety concern. People still do occasionally get poisoned by mixing ammonia and bleach even despite the repeated warnings.
Talking about the constituent parts is similarly relevant when you’re heating something to significant temperatures. Many reasonably safe substances really shouldn’t be tossed on a bond fire etc. For other things it’s not the substance itself that’s a concern but impurities from the manufacturing process. People often think of past recalls as companies doing something dumb, but I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get this stuff right.
I looked at the formula and that Oxygen double bond attached to a carbon with another oxygen bond... yikes!
I have no idea why this is stable. It appears stable, but you wonder about things like UV light, exposure to some cation, etc...
Well, seems like I have reading to do. (Chem engineer here, I feel like its my responsibility, similar to how programmers read open source code)
If you look into molecular orbital theory, the double bond causes overlap, which makes the bonds unstable. It can more easily jump off and create a new bond. If you want to see an even worse situation, look at Nitrogen triple bonds.
Further, the extra oxygen attached to the carbon makes the bond a bit polar since you have such a heavy electron clump on one side of the carbon.
That said, yeah, PLA is known to not be very stable, and that's part of the reason its biodegradable. It degrades into lactic-acid based large molecules that living beings have no problem on destroying. (But are toxic when you get several grams of it, so beware if you are doing strange chemical experiments with PLA.)
PLA is just going to break down into lactic acid. Big deal.
Breathing smoke and dust from PLA is bad, because breathing any type of smoke or dust is bad. Wildfire smoke is bad, but wood is not a harmful chemical.
We actually do understand the chemistry of plastics. And to a very large extent they are very safe, primarily because they are incredibly stable and non-degradable.
Even the studies of e.g. BPA health issues point to very weak effects. You need to do meta-analysis on tens of thousands of individuals to have statistically significant effects, and even then they are weak and it's not easy to say whether you have successfully eliminated confounding factors.
And "BPA-free" plastics just use BPF instead, with very similar chemistry. The consumer-facing BPA fuss is primarily driven by companies that want to sell products; health agencies are primarily concerned with occupational exposure, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger in terms of dose per body weight. BPA is metabolized in the kidneys to the benign BPA-G and excreted in urine; a dose 250 000 times the EU dose limit is cleared by the body in 24 hours.
PFAS is a similar story. Over long timescales with stupid disregard for basic PPE, like cross country ski waxing trailers where people were breathing C8-dust without masks for a thousand hours per year, there has been clear health concerns identified. So people are saying "there is no safe lower dose limit" and companies are switching to chemicals that haven't been used in the same context so there is little to no data on exposure safety, and saying "this will be safer".
I'm not asking to play 'gotcha' with your comment, but because when I've attempted to do my own research on this, I find it easy to get information on the polymer itself, but the polymer is never used by itself in a product. As far as I can tell, most polymers are not actually useful without a cocktail of additional chemicals added to them to change their physical characteristics. From my research, raw polymers tend to be extremely brittle and frangible, completely unrecognizable when compared to the products we use made from them.
And those additional chemicals are extremely difficult to find information on. Like when they're used, what they are, etc.
I guess my mind is instinctively reaching for the ways FDA attempts to ensure food safety by compelling manufacturers to publish ingredient lists, and by maintaining registries [0] of hopefully-well-understood additives (and banning the rest, in historically dangerous categories like colorants).
Sure from time to time agitators take that information out of context to whip up a scare about one ingredient or another, and sure some of the food that comes in from overseas has after-the-fact labeling that’s a little sus. But at least there’s an expectation that the information must exist and be legible.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/determin...
I disagree, because, that's like me telling you "The word 'Cancer' needs to die." etc.
That would imply you'd be required to tell me the specific cancer you refer to when you say "you aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon" etc.
General terms exist for a reason.
To stay with your example, it would be like discouraging the media from saying "cancer is cured" when they actually might mean "this specific type of lung cancer has a cure". To bring it back to "plastic", the media could focus on saying things like "teflon coating encourages these negative reactions..." as opposed to "plastics are poisoning us" which is way too vague to matter.
And on the case of plastics, that reason is that they are molded by the same processes.
It's about as relevant as talking about "metal contamination" of food when you are measuring mercury.
Can we? Have these been tested? Alone and/or while interacting with other such things in the wild? Or have these chemicals/plastics been introduced because they can be (i.e., no regulation or oversight), not because they are safe and have been proven to be so.
The default of "they're safe" is not the default we should be using.
It's not useful to nitpick over their long chains or oxygen double bonds. That rhetoric contributes nothing but deflective nerdery and confusion to the conversation.
> deflective nerdery
FWIW, the point about carbon bonds was actually a response to nerdery that's already present here, in a forum intended for digging into the nerdy details of various subjects.
Not all "plastics" cause harm (at least, not any more than the skin you shed every day).
I've seen countless disagreements on numerous topics caused by people thinking they both have the same definition of a term and even more instances of confusion because the intuitive implicit definition that came from the example usages they'd seen of a term was a non-representative subset of the things matched by the explicit definition.
Nuance and clarity of language matters, otherwise you'll ban "chemicals" and discover you actually have no sane definition of it and are inflicting a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Many “compostable” paper food and drink containers are lined with a ptfe film, which does get into the food.
Okay sure maybe it’s all leftover pfas reagents, (or maybe some break down but ignore that) it’s impossible for anyone to know that this particular instance of ptfe doesn’t have residual pfas.
No, we are awash in labels already and I am sick of everything having a legal treatise attached to it. Labels just throw the problem back in the laps of consumers, an approach which clearly does not work.
Some labels are good and informative. Some labels are just a way for corporations to blame consumers for what consumers cannot do anything about.
Falsehood: - "Consumers are purchasing toxic products, so that is what we make."
Reality: - "Consumers buy what is available and they can afford."
It's one way industry has scammed the public by convincing them much of the waste generated by low-cost (to the manufacturer) packaging was recyclable.
Is actually better for the planet that you just burn it yourself instead of wasting diesel on transport to nowhere.
And guess which one of these groups has actual influence on government policy? Yup, its the poor who get screwed.
If you let consumers decide, what you end up with is upper class suburban mums eating healthy bananas, while the homeless dude eats bananas that were grown in a superfund site.
Even if you disagree with my particular examples of the above three classes I think you'll be able to come up with something for each of them.
You might not think much about having specific types of labels, but its basically impossible for a chemist to know anything beyond ~8 generic types of plastic in the US.
They have a chemical policy[1] that is moving in the right direction, and labels like Oeko-Tex 100, Oeko-Tex Made in Green, Clean Beauty, BPA Free, Paraben Free and Recycled. The changes they are making as a part of their chemical policy (eliminating PFAS and other concerning chemicals from cleaning and baby items) are benefiting everyone, and consumers who have specific concerns can quickly get more information about what they are buying. Most consumers are increasingly aware of risks, but most do not have the desire or time to look into the manufacturing process for everything they buy.
1. https://corporate.target.com/sustainability-ESG/environment/...
If we banned everything that increases the risk of some sort of bad thing we'd probably end up banning everything (or more realistically, everything we'd do studies on).
Is walking "actually dangerous"? Is cycling? Is driving? Is swimming? Is hang gliding? Different people will give different answers to these questions and I've even kept them all to the domain of transportation!
Once you get to the realm of all chemistry things get very murky. E.g. Is sugar dangerous?
In practice we're evolved creatures full of hacks that work well enough to mostly not die before we've had kids, I would be very surprised if there was a single substance we consume (both intentionally and not) that doesn't damage something.
I think we either need to appreciate that the industrial world is poisoned and take that as the cost of doing business OR stop poisoning ourselves at the cost of substantial technological progress.
As far as polyesters go, the main cause for concern is the endocrine disrupting effect of polyethylene terephthalate[1] and the inability of PET to be broken down completely, leading to microplastic pollution. By contrast, PLA can be broken down by heat or a select number of micro-organisms, and the lactic acid monomer used to produce it is non-toxic. The polymer is formed by a simple condensation reaction to form ester linkages, releasing water. Esters are a very common and generally benign moiety found everywhere in nature, for example in cutin found in plants, forming the rigid exterior of cells exposed to the elements. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate
PLA and other acid co polymers are used in resorbable stitches and polymer medical devices where the biproducts are organic acids and carbon dioxide.
I second the ‘I don’t know’ for actual health effects of PLA but wanted to provide a counter point to comparing PTFE (indestructible C-F bond) to PLA (readily hydrolized C(=O)O- bonds)
Bonus points if you can tell me what each recycling number on plastic means without looking it up (it's the internet, so I have no way to enforce this).
Ester groups are quite innocuous. The most it will do is hydrolyze to oligomers of lactic acid.
Teflon, PLA, ABS, resins, foams, etc... are all plastics, but they are so unrelated outside their long chains, its terrible to stereotype them all into one category.
You aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon, but rather the manufacturing process. You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine.
Eat something with BPA in it, you are probably going to have a bad time.
Maybe the solution is better labeling. I know its near impossible to have perfect consistency in plastic manufacturing(I worked in foam, mind boggling we consider testing these foams one time, and considered it the same foam for the next 8 years). However, knowing precursors, additives, and potentially process would make a huge difference in our ability to track problems.