 In this video, I look at common cookware materials. Aluminum stainless steel cast iron will watch the video to find out which might be best to use. Over the last decades, the toxicity of aluminum for humans has been heavily discussed and still not completely clarified. Those occupationally exposed to aluminum and smelter plants suffer from oxidative stress, free radicals that can damage their DNA. But what about just using aluminum cookware? Articles like this, suggesting an unrecognized public health risk, was limited to the developing world, where cookware is made in informal shops by casting liquid aluminum melted from a collection of scrap metal, including the likes of lead batteries, which is how you can get so much lead leaching into people's food. But then this study was published, suggesting the aluminum itself may be harmful. Most of our aluminum exposure comes from processed junk. That contains aluminum-containing food additives, including those within some processed cheeses, baking powders, cake mixes, frozen dough, and pancake mixes. But approximately 20% of the daily intake of aluminum may come from aluminum cooking utensils, such as pans, pots, kettles, and trays. To see if this may be causing a problem, they took blood from consumers that used aluminum cookware versus those that did not, and found that not only were the aluminum users walking around with twice the level of aluminum in their blood, but they had more free radical damage of their body fats and proteins, and the total antioxidant capacity of their bloodstream was compromised. So no surprise, suffered significantly more DNA damage. And indeed, those with the highest levels of aluminum in their blood tended to suffer significantly more damage to their DNA. No surprise, since aluminum is considered to be a pro-oxidant agent. These folks weren't just casually using aluminum pots, though, but specifically using them daily to cook and store acidic foods like yogurt and tomato sauce, which can leach out more aluminum. But even just a week using camping dishes, which tend to be aluminum since they're so light, if you were incorporating something acidic, like marinating a fresh catch in lemon juice, could greatly exceed the tolerable weekly intake guidelines, especially for children. Once in a while it's not going to make much of a difference, but this suggests that you may not want to be cooking in aluminum day in and day out. What about aluminum drinking bottles? They're nice and light, but children drinking two cups of tea or juice a day from them could exceed the tolerable aluminum exposure limit. So out of an abundance of caution, safety authorities, like the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, recommend that consumers avoid the use of aluminum pots or dishes for acidic or salted foodstuffs, such as applesauce, rhubarb, tomato puree, or salt herring to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of aluminum. What about aluminum foil? It's a common culinary practice to wrap food in aluminum foil and bake it. The concern is that this could potentially present a hazardous source of aluminum in the human diet. When put to the test, yes there was leakage from the foil to the food, but the amount was so small that it would be more of an issue for small children or those suffering from diminished kidney function. What about just wrapping a food in foil to store in the fridge? Only marginal increases in aluminum are seen unless the food is in contact with both the foil and, at the same time, certain other types of metal. For example, stainless steel, which is largely iron, so that sets up a battery and so can lead to tremendous food aluminum concentrations. For example, here's the aluminum levels in a ham before and after a day covered in foil, but take that same ham and that same day of foil on top of a steel tray or serving plate and the aluminum levels in the ham shoots up. And finally, you know how there's sometimes a glossy side of aluminum foil and then kind of a dull side? Which would be worse? Fish fillets were baked and grilled both ways, wrapped in the glossy side versus wrapped in the dull side, and no significant difference was found. In my last video I expressed concerns about the use of aluminum cookware, so what's the best type of pots and pans to use? Stainless steel is an excellent option. The metal shows in an application for safety and hygiene or considered upmost important, such as kitchenware. But what about studies showing stainless steel can leach nickel and chromium into foods during cooking? That's what keeps the iron in stainless steel unstained by rust. The leaching is really only when they're brand new. Metal leaching decreases with sequential cooking cycles and stabilizes after the sixth time you cook with it. Under more common day-to-day conditions, the use of stainless steel pots is considered to be safe even for most people who are acutely sensitive to those metals. A little leaching metal can be a good thing, in the case of straight iron, like a cast iron skillet, which can have the beneficial effect of helping to improve iron status, helping to potentially reduce the incidence of iron deficiency anemia among reproductive age women and children. The only caveat is that you don't want to be frying in cast iron. Frying isn't healthy regardless, but at hot temperatures vegetable oil can react with the iron to create trans fats. What about using non-stick pans? Teflon, also known as polytetrafluoroethylene, is used as an intercoating material in non-stick cookware. Teflon's dark history was the subject of a recent movie called Dark Water, starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway. Employees in DuPont's Teflon division started giving birth to deformed babies before DuPont removed all female staff from the unit. Of course, they buried it all, hiding it from regulators and the public. Despite the significant history of industry knowledge about how toxic some of the chemicals used to make Teflon were, they were able to keep it all hidden. But eventually, we're forced to settle for over a half a billion dollars after one of the chemicals was linked to kidney and testicular cancers, pregnancy-induced hypertension, ulcerative colitis, and high cholesterol. At normal cooking temperatures, Teflon-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity. Here's some of the different gases that are released at different temperatures and the toxic effects that have been documented. You've heard of canaries in a coal mine? Well, they're more like canaries in a kitchen, as cooking with Teflon cookware is well known to kill pet birds in the house. Or, Teflon-coated heat-lamp bulbs are wiping out half a chicken flaw. Apart from the gases released during heating the cooking pans, the coating itself starts damaging after a certain period. It's normally advised to use slow heating when cooking in Teflon-coated pans, but you can imagine how consumers might ignore that. And some of the Teflon can start chipping off if you're not careful and make its way into the food, though the effects of ingestion are unknown. This is the only study I could find looking at the potential human health effects of cooking with non-stick pots and pans, and the use of non-stick cooker was associated with about a 50% increased risk of colorectal cancer, but that may be because of what they were cooking. Non-stick cookware is used in hazardous high-heat cooking methods, like broiling, frying, grilling, or barbecuing, mainly for meat, poultry, or fish, in which carcinogenic heterocyclic amines are formed from the animal protein. And then the animal fat can produce another class of carcinogens called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, though it's possible it was the Teflon itself, which contains suspected carcinogens like that C8 compound from the movie, also known as PFOA for fluoroctinoic acid. Due to toxicity concerns, this chemical has been replaced with other chemicals such as Gen X, but these new alternatives are also suspected to have similar toxicity. But we've already so contaminated the earth with it, that we now can get it pre-packaged in food before it's even cooked, particularly in fish, dairy products, and meat, which is now the main source of human exposure to these toxic pollutants. Of those, seafood is the worst. In a study of diets from around the world, fish and seafood were major contributors of the perfluoro-alcohol substances, as expected, given that everything eventually flows into the sea. Though the aquatic food chain is the primary transfer mechanism for these toxins into the human diet, food stored or prepared in grease-proof packaging materials like microwave popcorn may also be a source. And in 2019, Oral-B Clyde Dental Floss was tested. 6 out of 18 dental floss products they tested showed evidence of Teflon-type compounds. Here's the list. So, did those who use those kinds of floss end up with higher levels in their bloodstream? Yes, apparently so. Higher levels of perfluorohexan sulfonic acid were found in Oral-B Clyde flossers. You know, there's lots of environmental exposures. In the modern world, we can't avoid, but we shouldn't be making things worse by adding it to consumer products. But hey, at least it gives us some power to lower our personal exposure to these harmful chemicals.