How Big A Concern Are Ptfes And Pfoas Anyway?

If youve read more than just a handful of non-stick cookware reviews

, youve no doubt come across the acronyms PTFE and PFOA. These are shorthand for the chemicals used to coat nearly all non-stick cookware. Essentially, theyre what gives the pots and pans their main feature and primary selling point.

Unfortunately, there are some known issues with these chemicals, and it has been cause enough for concern that the EPA has drafted regulations banning their use by 2015. Thats great come 2015, but it means that right now, today, if you head to a big box store and make a purchase, youll almost certainly be buying a set of pots and pans made with one or both of these chemicals.

How big a risk do they pose? As with most scientific queries, the answer is, it depends.

The hotter you cook, the bigger the risk. The older the pot or pan youre using, the bigger the risk. The primary side effects are that its been known to be fatal to birds, and it can cause flu like symptoms in humans, so were not talking about something that will give you cancer (at least, not so far as the research indicates), but still, the idea that the act of preparing and eating a meal could make you sick is disconcerting to many. Thus the EPAs ruling.

There are green non-stick cookware brands whose products are certified to not contain the chemicals mentioned above, but these arent as non sticky as the brands that use PTFEs and PFOAs. Plus, they tend to be pricier, and suffer from the same limitations that all non stick cookware suffers from (namely, a relatively short useful life as compared with cookware made from copper, stainless steel, or cast iron), so the benefits of going green in this case may be somewhat less than you might expect. Not to say that its not worth looking into, and the green companies are improving their products all the time, but it is something to keep in mind.

At the end of the day then, theres no strong evidence that PTFEs or PFOAs will kill you (though if you keep birds as pets in your home and use nonstick cookware, you may want to keep them out of the kitchen), there is evidence to suggest that they could make you sick if you regularly cook at temperatures above five hundred degrees.

by: Chris Hartpence

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