Nonstick Cookware Industry Furious at Suggestion They Should Stop Causing Cancer
Nonstick Cookware Industry Furious at Suggestion They Should Stop Causing Cancer
The makers of America's nonstick cookware are none too pleased about a new law that will bar them from using carcinogenic "forever chemicals."
Carbon steel or cast iron all the way.
Stainless steel! Neither of those is something you want to use to simmer a tomato sauce.
Available at a thrift store near you, with no carbon cost!
A bit ironic that a group labeling themselves the "Cookware Sustainability Alliance" is fighting to continue making unsustainable cookware.
Both the fact that they have a voice that influences politicians more than their actual voters and that they're allowed to call themselves that name is really a perfect representation of society.
Costly but good
Cast iron is cheap at the second hand store.
GenX was basically told that "Teflon is inert, it can't hurt you."
Well fuck me.
Has there been any evidence to point out that PFTE is not inert?
This article seems to be about the production of PFTE, which is well-known to be quite harmful, but the end product is as far as I know not unsafe to use.
Some, yes. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-02/is-non-stick-cookware-safe/104160814 Heating pans too hot can partially release harmful chemicals. There's not enough study on ingesting the particles from scraping a pan. I quit using them over a decade ago and replaced them with cast iron. It's a different way of cooking but once you learn works really well.
Previous formulations were also claimed to be inert and non-toxic, but were later found not to be. Current ptfe seems to be safe so far but at this point I’m really cynical about safety of these chemicals, industry willingness to inflict them on us and ineffectiveness of governments safety regulations. They’re forever chemicals. Even if they are safe, they will be in the environment, in ever increasing doses, forever. They are accumulating in you, your food, everything you ingest, forever. That doesn’t seem prudent.
What are you going to do if a toxic pattern emerges, but you’ve already incorporated ptfe into your body? even if the the end product is safe, manufacturing chemicals are not: do you accept your part in these toxic forever chemicals?
There’s not much an individual can do, but I can replace non-stick with other materials as they grow older. I have cast iron, stainless, glass, or ceramic as appropriate, that we know lasts longer and will not have a problem.
Keep in mind that nonstick cookware is still very safe when handled correctly. The problem lies in the manufacturing of these needed chemicals. When these chemicals get into the environment, because of improper safety management, it will stay there for hundreds of years, taking it's toll on flora and fauna.
very safe when handled correctly
Too many people are not educated about that.
The problem lies in the manufacturing of these needed chemicals. When these chemicals get into the environment, because of improper safety managemen
Which is one of the reasons for that law, see:
Dubbed "Amara's Law" after 20-year-old cancer victim Amara Strande, who in 2023 succumbed to a rare type of liver cancer linked to PFAS after growing up near a Minnesota-based 3M plant that dumped them into the local water supply, the new regulation bans the chemicals and any items made with them from being sold within the state.
Wait, it's not the material on the Pans?
It is the material on the pans, but the only case where the companies making the stuff were successfully sued was when they were caught for dumping intermediates of the chemical in to a tributary of Ohio river.
It’s hard to pin down how impactful the coatings on the pans are because of how many other sources of these kinds of fluorocarbons are in house hold items, and in the environment due to large companies disposing of them recklessly. We know for a fact that basically everyone has some level of these compounds in them due to their ubiquity.
The pans are just one potential source and a particularly notable one because they’re in contact with food.
Does Teflon even break down into PFAS at all? From what I read I think it doesn't.
PTFE and chemicals used in its production are some of the best-known and widely applied PFAS
Capitalists furious at suggestion they value human life over money
ftfy
yeah it's a day ending in Y
I think distinctions matter
What a ridiculous world we live in. The board members should be facing prison sentences, the company's liquidated and the money back to the people.
The money should be put into a cancer fund to pay for research and people's medical bills from the cancer all this shit causes.
How about the suggestions that they are selling a product that should last for several lifetimes but instead lasts for 5 years if you treat it very well?
I moved to using cast iron and steel pans, I found even hand washing non-stick pans they eventually just get scuffed up after years.
I'd rather just use a few more drops of oil on a regular pan.
Personally I don't give a damn about a pan whose entire life is spent slowly scraping away the carciogen on it and ingesting it with every meal you make. I am however not going to be scammed by the teflon pan manufacturers into buying a new overpriced pan every few years. Every other non non-stick pan outlasts multible generations of humans. A non stick in a professional kitchen won't even make it to 1 year old.
If we didn't live in capitalist plutocracies masquerading as "democracy", every non-stick pan ever sold would be blatant false advertising and they wouldn't be profitable to sell anymore.
Lifetime guarantee my ass. None last more than a couple years of daily use regardless of how meticulously they're cared for.
You'll find that lifetime guarantee almost always means for production errors. Not wear and tear.
I hate how we allowed these ghouls to make the word "nonstick" synonymous with teflon/PFAS. It makes it sound like if you use a regular pan, you constantly have to scrape off burnt food or something. That's just not true, a well-seasoned regular pan can be just as "nonstick" as one with a PFAS coating. It's a fake non-problem that was invented to sell this garbage that poisons us and the environment. If it was up to me, the executives at dupont and anyone else responsible for this psyop would be sent off to labor camps (with humane working conditions of course)
And you don't even have to use a cast iron. I've been cooking on stainless steel for a decade. I chuck it in the dishwasher when I'm done.
And as long as it's oiled and hot, nothing sticks; not even eggs or fish. Especially if you use butter. But oil's just fine.
"And as long as it's oiled and hot, nothing sticks; not even eggs or fish. Especially if you use butter. But oil's just fine"
My wife the pot and pan murderer would like a word.
Can't really cook this way oil-free though. I roast my food in a toaster oven, on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Took some getting used to, but I find it more convenient too.
Issues with food sticking to either a stainless, carbon steel, or cast iron pan, largely come down to technique and maintenance.
So if you’re going out to buy a teflon pan you’re admitting that either you’re a bad cook, or you’re lazy…. Or both.
If it was up to me, I would make it legal to ship them off to North Korea.
Is it really that bad? Sure it might be linked to cancer but so are lots of other things.
I personally just use normal cookware plus some vision stuff. All you need to do is salute some onions ahead of adding other things. The juice from the onions acts as a natural non stick.
In reality no one can say for certain, but a lot of research is pointing to long term exposure being bad. The problem is that the research to determine how bad will take decades (and has been going on for decades at this point). Right now it's being used as the boogeyman for every sort of ill from causing cancer, infertility, issues with lactation, liver failure, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, and auto-immune disorders. Basically the preliminary research says that it at least in part impacts all of these things, we just don't know how much.
On the flip side bacon also causes cancer and high cholesterol at some level. That's not to make light of the situation, but it does give some credence to your earlier statement.
The thing people are missing in these discussions is what are they willing to live without if we don't use these chemicals. Going without non-stick cookware is literally the tip of the iceberg. How do we feel about cars, furniture, and mattresses being more flammable because they don't have the fire retarding forever chemicals? How do we feel about stain resistance, oil resistance, water resistance, and slip resistance in everything including shoes, umbrellas, clothes, oven mitts, jackets, and more? How do we feel about needing to clean everything including clothes, appliances, and floors more often. How about in industry where it's used as a fume suppressant so smelly chemicals don't waft as far or fire fighting foams the next time an electric car catches on fire? This stuff is even in the wrapping of your food so the it doesn't go through the packaging and cause a mess as easily.
Dupont coined the phrase "Better Living Through Chemistry" and that chemistry is PFAS. It's in your clothes when you buy them, it's in your detergent when you clean them, it's in the cleaner that you wipe your washer off with, it's in the floor sealant of the laundry room that washer is in, it's in the gloves you wear while cleaning that laundry room, it's in the carpet in the room next to the laundry room, and the list goes on and on.
Dropping PFAS chemicals fully would probably send us back to the 1960's or we'll end up replacing it with something just as bad that we don't know the effects of yet.
It's not just the use itself, but also how irresponsibly it is produced. Exposing pregnant workers to high levels, dumping it in community water supplies, on farmland etc.
Also the EU did ban them last september (effective in 2026) for essentially all of the uses you outlined, most of which I dont think are such a big deal and just minor inconveniences. It's not like the 60s were terrible in terms of living conditions.
We also used to use asbestos for a lot of the uses you outlined and we got rid of that without too much inconvenience, but you could have made similar arguments about it back then.
And any reduction is a good thing, it's not an all or nothing thing. DDT was banned, but can and is still used where there's no better alternative. And just categorically saying any alternative must be just as bad is just a non-sequitur, there's no reason that should be true. Cookware is a good example, cast iron works just as well, is not as bad, the only downside compared to teflon is weight. But it's not like sending us back to the stone age or anything...
How do we feel about having 8g of plastic in our brain. Each of us. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cef0/fd3b2409e2ef92182d9fc42e4308d5fe1b2b.pdf
It's in the rain and every freshwater fish or lake water has it, such that even once per year fish consumption is not recommended. Safe level is 4.4ng per kg body weight/week. 300ng for adult male. Half kilo of fish will be 4800ng. Technically that is 3 fish portions per year, but you will get enough smaller amounts every day to breech limit with freshwater fish.
You have a point that it may still be needed for some stuff.
Yes. Get as far away from that shit as you can.
Can't even use a Teflon pan if you have a budgie or the fumes will kill it.
So I think it is probably quite bad.
It’s perfectly fine so long as none of the coating gets in your body, but given you’re making food with it, there’s a high chance it will.
If it get’s too hot it will off gas, if it gets scratched with something harder than it (like a metal spatula, or salt grains) it will flake off. So you should use plastic or wood utensils when cooking in one, and the black plastic utensils have their own issues with often being made from recycled plastics that have fire retardants mixed in, which can leach out.
You can be safe with them but it requires you be careful and deliberate with use. Personally, I think it’s easier just to use something else, even if that means taking the time to learn about how to use them well.
I never use anything but wood and plastic so it is probably fine
This article is horrible. Anyway..
Teflon has a melting point of 327°C, that can happen on a stove.
IMO It's fine, just don't burn your pan. Not sure about scratching it, but don't do that either.
it seems like the primary concern of the article is the waste from producing it, not its usage
I'm not sure you need to melt it for the PFAS to leech out. There was a study recently about smart watch bands and they found that the PFAS exposure from wearing them was way above safe limits and they weren't being heated to 327C.
Admittedly frypan coatings and watch bands are not the same materials, but still...
using a pan means you have to construct that pan, in a factory that pollutes massive amount of PFAS directly into the soil and water table.
My mom has like "chemophobia" is is constantly afraid medications or "GMO". Well looks like she got this part right tho, she was always afraid of a non stick stuff chipping off and hate any "non stick" cookware. Broken clock, twice a day, ya know.
Medications
Sometimes worse side effects than the thing it's trying to cure. Sometimes used to cure something that better diet and more exercise could take care of. Made by companies more concerned with money than your health outcomes. What's to be afraid of?
GMO
Nothing wrong with GMO itself, but every company using GMO doesn't use it to make food higher quality or taste better. They use it to engineer pesticides into your food, increase crop yields, and patent our seeds, for, you guessed it, money! Insecticides specifically can be neurotoxic to humans. What's to be afraid of?
Maybe you should listen to your mom instead of badmouthing her to strangers on the Internet.
I haven't seen anything that actually links GMOs to something that is a concrete negative. There are so many claims that "artificial" and GMOs are somehow bad but yet people can't seem to quantify why or how.
I think it is mostly just marketing fluff. What's worse is that the so called "organic" produce is almost certainly worse for the environment. Also some of the "natural" pesticides are worse for humans if actually consumed.
Never really had any issue with Teflon (and Teflon substitute) pans, but I've been impressed with the non-stickiness of my dirt cheap "ceramic" wok.
Ya know I finally got myself a cast iron pan and it works great!
I’ve found that the ceramics lose their non stick quality at around the 2 year mark
The issue is that we don’t have much research on the ceramic coatings ether. They might be fine, but, there hasn’t really been enough testing to know. We might just be walking in to the same problem all over again, fluorocarbon coatings seemed fine at fist to, then they turned out to be a huge problem.
All real nonstick cookware is Teflon or chemically related to it. I almost always use cast iron or carbon steel but they are not nonstick, you have to control heat and acidity for them to release well. You can even see in nonstick pans that liquids will tend to bead up and not spread out because of the surface, versus in any other pan you'll only see water bead up when you hit certain temps. I can only achieve something like a French omelette in a nonstick pan, carbon steel has always been a disaster, because of that me and a lot of other people keep a nonstick around just for certain egg and crepe recipes.
you’ll only see water bead up when you hit certain temps.
Basically If you FIRST heat up your stainless steel cookware to the point that when you drip some water on it, it "beads up" instead of immediately boiling away, your cookware becomes temporarily non-stick. Just don't want to go a lot hotter than that, or you'll do things like burn butter (unless using Ghee butter or something with a higher "smoke point")
Wikipedia makes it sound like not all Teflon pans require PFOA, which is the actual problem here (not that the article describes it clearly).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-stick_surface
PFOA/PFOS is in lots of other household shit though, like raincoats
hashtag not all pans
I use Greenpan, a ceramic nonstick pan
I was shopping around for nonstick pans some months ago, and exhaustively looking to see if any of them were free of pfas and other toxins. By the end I was nearly pulling my hair out because they pretty much are all bad, including Greenpan. I no longer have the variety of sources I found back then, but here's one source on them (mind you I wouldn't necessarily trust this site's recommendations either).
https://www.leafscore.com/eco-friendly-kitchen-products/why-we-no-longer-recommend-greenpan/
Same! I love my Greenpans.
Just clean your cookware people
What if my cookware isn't people and just metal pans, do I still have to clean them?
These non-stick pans are usually cheaper then stainless steel and cast iron, so people with lower income are more prone to buy it. Consequently, considering that low education is associated with poverty, poor people are buying more of this type of pans and not using it "properly" so getting exposed to possibly more harm and not knowing about it.
Also, " just discard the pan if flocking occurs", is everything that this industry wants: you'll continue in an indefinitely loop of trowing away pans and buying new ones for the maximization of their profits. Thus is expected that flocking will occur more soon than ever.
Those who cannot cook use not stick.
But they cannot cook, what are they doing with pans. Are they stupid?
I just like nonstick for easy cleanup. Also they make teflon-free nonstick pans. My grandma has some.
More like those who aren’t taught how to use carbon steel, cast iron, and ceramics.