Teflon coated stuff

[jacob]

As found on cookware, curtains, and some fabrics/clothing.

Irrelevant concern? Scaremongering? Best to avoid? Nearly impossible to avoid anyway?

Random googling reveals a lot of acronyms that exceed my knowledge of chemistry which has more or less regressed to junior high-school level.

[unemployable]

Teflon's been around for what, 50-60 years? You'd think if it killed people we'd know by now.

[Stahlmann]

it seems there's small subchapter on this in the book which you coauthored recently

[jacob]

@unemployable - I suppose it depends on your definition or "we" and "know" respectively. I can think of many things that kill people that have been killing people for much longer than "we know" because most we's don't know.

@stahlmann - Ah, yes, I see. While I did comment on a couple of sections, I have not coauthored anything. I understand that the safe choice is avoiding [teflon] entirely but seeing as the chemicals are already found in humans all over the world including people who are not directly using/consuming the products, I wonder whether it's possible to make any difference through personal action or whether the damage is just the new baseline. I think this is where expert input would be helpful. I like to quantify.

[CS]

The problem with the cookware is how much gets ingested. A good cooking technique renders it irrelevant in any case, so I just get stainless steel. Also, if your pan lasts forever with care, that is much more ER than a pan that gets damaged even with gentle use.

Don't you use cast iron anyhow?

[Jean]

I agree with CS concerning cookware.
Teflon coated pans have to be replaced so often that it's more practical to use steel or cast iron.

[slsdly]

I can't comment on the health issues, but I do have a ceramic skillet that gets a decent amount of use. I've read concerns on the durability being less than that of a teflon skillet, but that has not been my experience. It still feels new after a few years. Mind you, I don't use it at the highest temperatures (set of stainless steel for that), and I hand wash everything. Nor was it particularly expensive.

[Clarice]

I'm not an expert, but I'll chime in anyway. Since experts disagree on the subject I would fall back on a precautionary principle. "Use less", as always, is a good answer.
"cookware, curtains, and some fabrics/clothing."
Cookware - Fry less. When you fry pick your poison. If you are a man you have to weigh the dangers of hemochromatosis (excess iron in the blood) from stainless steel/cast iron vs. the dangers of Teflon (whatever they are). If you are a woman you are highly unlikely to have this condition as you lose blood monthly, so cast iron/stainless steel is better.
Curtains - Do they outgas? Probably.
Fabrics/Clothing - Personally, I never buy anything wrinkle-free. That's where this stuff is found.

Another thought on the subject is that this stuff probably excretes through urine. So "Drink more water" is also a good answer.

[prognastat]

@Clarice

re-Cookware for men, nothing a good bloodletting can't solve.Bring on the leeches.

[Sclass]

I use stainless sauce pans but I like the convenience of Teflon coated skillets. My wife and I have this never ending argument about what damages Teflon coating. After manufacturing oodles of Teflon coated parts for my products I finally learned that high temperatures are the enemy. It’s how the coating goes on and it’s how it comes off. Teflon coatings are very durable till you heat them up to a few hundred C. Then they bubble up and peel. Up to that point they are probably outgassing small amounts of toxins. Deadly? I dunno.

So we try to keep food and water in our pans. Uniformly distributed around the surface. This keeps the temperature from running away. In the past my wife would heat up an empty pan while cutting up food or getting items out of the fridge. Drove me crazy and started a lot of arguments about Teflon coating techniques. What not to do.

As for general outgassing, new stuff spews out high concentrations of carcinogenic compounds. One of the tests for optical devices in car cabins is how much organic haze they can take on the lenses before they stop working. That stuff you wipe off the inside of the glass in your new car is organic goo from outgassing plastics. The major automakers have specs for this because it is critical for things like passenger monitors and proximity sensors.

I sold a bunch of gas analyzers to scientists over the years. These guys showed me some interesting data like toxic concentrations of outgassing in new electric razors. Apparently new items were putting out levels of carcinogens in concentrations exceeding OSHA regulations when held up to the nose. You know that Stinking new plastic smell of your new shaver or the plastic water bottle cap? For the first week after unboxing they were OSHA unsafe when held up to your nose...which is exactly what we do. I forgot the name of the guy who bought that system from me but he published his results someplace.

So I like middle aged cars. Not too old to be disintegrating and not too young to be gas chambers.

Let your new electric razor sit in the garage for a week before using it. I let my newest water bottle air out a month. It was glass but the rubber cap stunk so bad I’d gag on the water. Cook some old food you plan to toss out in your brand new pans...then discard the food. Common sense stuff.

[Kriegsspiel]

Having excess iron in the blood sounds neat. Like you are a little bit up-armored.

[ZAFCorrection]

If you burn PTFE you are going to generate nanoparticles which are not great for you (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11042093)

An overview of the toxicity of using teflon cookware is given here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28913736)

There is also some literature on cells successfully growing in the presence of PTFE, but that doesn't seem particularly significant. My key question on random stuff going into my body is "how easily does it GTFO?" The body seems to have a pretty good setup for utilizing and expelling iron, for instance. Not so much with random polymeric pieces of shit, particularly ones like PTFE which by design are very resistant to chemical attack.

Incidentally, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in biology research where you get to introduce nano and micro-particles of various compositions and surface characteristics to immortal cell lines like HeLa and then watch what happens. There are huge gaps in that area of study, which is kind of disturbing given how much new and random stuff is getting introduced to our tissues on a daily basis.

My suspicion is a decent number of instances of cancer and other disease are caused by one-off cases of environmental toxicity. Like using your new, outgassing water bottle to drink your low-pH smoothies, giving off nanoparticles of a particular size distribution and with a particular zeta potential. People are not likely to pick that up in a study.

[Campitor]

We're more likely to die from WHAT we eat versus what type of mass produced pan we cook our food in. I like using Teflon because I can cook with very little to no oil. I prefer stainless steel or cast iron when baking or roasting.

Perhaps this article by the American Cancer Society will put the teflon risk into perspective: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-ca ... -pfoa.html

[Sclass]

I can easily scare myself into thinking I’m exposing myself to cancer causing agents.

It kind of goes with some of the mentality encountered around here. Maybe a lot of us think too far ahead. This is how I work with my paranoia.

Of the folks I knew getting cancer, there were two groups. People who didn’t seem to have any risk who just got it. Genetics? Or was it some unknown tumor promoter encountered in daily life that could have been avoided I think this was a small group but it was scary so maybe it had a bigger impact on me psychologically.

Then there was a second group, bigger I think, who just made me say, “dude, you better stop doing that or your gonna get cancer.” I’m talking experimental physicists working with isotopes in unsafe labs. Exotic materials researchers. I also knew folks working in industrial environments that would make me choke and vomit on the chemical vapor when I toured. And chain smokers. Hepatitis B carriers and their families. Technicians working with experimental scanning electron microscopy or CAT scan experimental systems regularly. One friend who built asbestos insulated furnaces for experiments regularly with his bare hands and no mask. Eventually these people got cancer...not overnight but after multi decade careers in science and industry. A lot of exposure to known hot substances.

This is a far cry from frying up an omelette on Teflon. Now maybe, just maybe some of the people in the first group got some “hot” substance in their home bought at Target in a seemingly benign device. But again, it could be a family history of some kind as well.

Really though, we can freak about anything. Scared of Teflon? Look into Acrylamides. That oxidized layer of oil left on cast iron pans is full of it. When do we just stop freaking and start living?

This kind of fear really gets in the way of living. I try to ease myself to sleep at night by saying my exposure is light (ppb outgassing) and the sources are questionable.

[cmonkey]

Look into Acrylamides.

Regarding acrylamides...

Stuff like this makes it hard to actually find the real threats to your health.

[ZAFCorrection]

@Sclass

It's definitely easy to go overboard, and it's best not to be one of the dihydrogen monoxide people. Though, there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of avoiding issues. It basically comes down to what you eat and what you inhale. Food is pretty easy; don't buy crap, avoid burning it as much as possible, and don't let it touch questionable surfaces, particularly at high temperature. Inhalation is pretty difficult living in a real city, but it is not that difficult to stay away from areas that are likely to produce excess particles* or give off a weird smell.

Hopefully, most people are not coming in contact with high levels of ionizing radiation on a regular basis. Though, apparently the hardass x-ray diffractometer service engineers disable the safety interlock and do the beam alignment with the beam unshuttered and the door open.

*https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cha ... l1_8655608

[Sclass]

Inhalation is pretty difficult living in a real city, but it is not that difficult to stay away from areas that are likely to produce excess particles* or give off a weird smell.

Hopefully, most people are not coming in contact with high levels of ionizing radiation on a regular basis. Though, apparently the hardass x-ray diffractometer service engineers disable the safety interlock and do the beam alignment with the beam unshuttered and the door open.

Yep. It only takes a few ppb of airborne toxin to set off the nose. My rule is if I can smell it, it probably isn’t a high enough concentration to worry about unless I am continually exposed. Like working in a paint factory. There are only a few ppb of organics going up the nose but it is every breath in every hour in every workday.

My good friend on the electron microscope died in his 30s. He was the badass tech with tools hanging out of his pocket with his arms deep in the machine. He could make the machine roll over and do flips but I think he got exposed to x-rays in the process. In a lab a few doors down the same guys had a CAT scanner. There was supposed to be shielding in the walls around the thing but one day a curious girlfriend of one of the techs put those X-ray badges on the bookshelves in the neighboring office. They detected xrays. The lab managers tore the walls apart and they found that the contractor never installed the shields. That was the other tech that got cancer.