 In our modern world, we have to be mindful of things beyond diet and exercise in order to be healthy, such as kitchen equipment. Certain cookware can actually leach dangerous chemicals and heavy metals that are far worse for you than pollutants in our food. The chief concerns here are Teflon, aluminum, copper, and ceramic. All of these are dangerous and should not be used. Teflon has known chemicals and toxins that leach into your food. Teflon actually gives off gases when it is heated and increases the risk for various types of cancers. Gases from Teflon pans have actually been documented to kill birds. Aluminum foil and cookware leaches aluminum into the food and aluminum is a neurotoxin commonly linked to Alzheimer's. Copper cookware can very easily lead to copper toxicity and it is very dangerous to use copper cookware in certain cooking circumstances. It looks nice, it's pretty, you shouldn't cook with it. 100% ceramic is safe for cooking, but ceramic coating is not durable and when it starts chipping it can actually leach heavy metals into your food. These are the most common materials that are cooked with. Here I have a Teflon pan that my family uses because they don't seem to care. Look at how my dad literally cuts up things in the pan and scratches the hell out of it. I'm surprised they're even alive at this point. This is just an example of what to not use. Another thing that is commonly used in just about every single household is aluminum foil as well as these aluminum baking trays. Under no circumstance should you cook food in these. You could store something in aluminum as long as you're not heating it. Many people are aware of the dangers of these pans and they opt for cast iron. I don't really like cast iron as it's hard to cool down and clean compared to other pans especially carbon steel. Carbon steel is a more expensive cast iron, that's how I like to put it. It holds the heat well, it heats up very quickly, but it's much easier to clean. This reduces the margin of error when trying to keep your cooking fat below the smoke point to minimize oxidation. For those of you that don't know, whenever you put butter or oil or beef fat, lard, whatever it is into a pan, once it gets to a certain temperature and starts smoking, the fat starts denaturing and oxidizing and that can be bad for you to some degree. With a carbon steel that is a little bit easier to control. So I have two carbon steel pans here. One is seasoned and one is not seasoned. I wanted to do this to show you guys what they look like when you get them and what they're supposed to look like after they're seasoned. So on the right here is the same brand of pan, just a different size. So both of these are debutier. It's a pretty famous French brand and this actually has some rust on it because I haven't seasoned it yet and it's just been lying around. You know, carbon steel, when you buy it, it looks like a nice clean steel pan. And after you season it once, it's going to look ugly as hell like this. And seasoning a carbon steel pan is very simple. You take your preferred cooking fat. Here I have a jar of marrow fat and you rub a very thin layer of fat around the whole inside of the pan. You can do the outside as well and the handle if you want to. Then you put the pan in the oven upside down at a very high heat. I usually do about 500 degrees for an hour. And then you turn the oven off, let the pan cool off. Then you'll have a seasoning. You can repeat this several times. And the reason the fat needs to be a really thin layer is to create a thin seasoning. Maybe I'll do a video on how to season a carbon steel pan. Let me know. But in regards to the maintenance of this pan, it's similar to cast iron. So you would cook your food, heat the pan up, put some fat in it, sear the meat. And then when you're done cooking, I just take a rag and I wipe out the inside, put a little more fat in for the next time I go to cook. And then you're good to go. So it should be non-stick if you do this properly. And it's not going to leach anything harmful into your food. Whether you're searing a steak, making sunny side up eggs, whatever it is, these pans are great and they're oven safe. So you can sear your steak, put this pan in the oven, flip it over, do whatever. But in regards to actually cooking in the oven and using other cooking services on the stove top, wherever it may be, we do have other options. Enameled cast iron is a pretty good option, but it tends to be incredibly expensive. Those are like those really big Dutch ovens you see that are typically pretty colorful. And that can be good for slow cooking, for a roast, whatever it may be. Stainless steel is good as well, but it can be very tricky to pan sear stuff with a stainless steel pan. So if you're boiling water, if you're making a sauce for general cooking purposes, stainless steel is very good. For searing meat and fish though, I prefer to use cast iron or carbon steel. It's a little bit more forgiving from a nonstick perspective. Yes, I have successfully seared stuff in a stainless steel pan, but it can be very difficult and tricky to do. Now, I don't use my pan a lot because I don't cook inside. I use my grill just about every single day of the year, even in the middle of a winter snowstorm. If you want to see my grill set up, check out my day of eating video yesterday. It's a propane gas grill and I lifted the grates up. I took the burner guards off. I put a steel rack over the burners and now I layer firewood over those burners. And what I've essentially created is a very hot wood burning fire that's easy to ignite every single day to get a nice flavor and crust on every single piece of meat that I cook. Honestly, I can't go back to pan searing and using an oven after experiencing the flavor of a wood fire. Hey listen, pan searing is great and it's still good, but I've been sticking to the grill lately. If you do cook a lot of stuff in the oven, you guys might have seen like glass pans from Pyrex. Those are pretty good. There's no evidence that negative things leach from glass. However, glass is a fairly sticky surface. Clay pots and clay cookware, although they seem pretty natural, can actually be contaminated depending on where the clay comes from. And you can't really test that. I mean, you could, but who wants to spend a few hundred dollars to test a piece of clay cookware? Another downside to cooking inside on these pans is I tend to smoke out my house or my apartment. So that's why I prefer to use my grill. And even if I am using a pan and I need to pan sear something, I'll still use the pan on the grill just to avoid the mess and the grease of cleaning up inside. And whenever we discuss cooking meat at a high temperature, the topic of carcinogens always comes up. Two in particular, heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The only studies really done on these were in rats with unrealistic doses. These rats weren't exactly eating smoked brisket, otherwise they would be very happy rats. And humans have been cooking meat for hundreds of thousands of years. I've talked about this in the past, videos titled Meat and Cancer. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because you shouldn't be worried about choosing one cooking technique over another for carcinogen reasons. Whether it's searing, grilling, roasting, boiling, poaching, raw food, the most important thing is food quality. Tying back to cooking stuff in the oven, the glass pyrex dishes are an option. You could also get stainless steel cooking racks. Those are also good. Pretty much any of the materials I mentioned. Just to reiterate all the safe cooking materials, you have carbon steel, stainless steel, cast iron, glass and 100% ceramic. Some of the stuff is pretty expensive but you're cooking food every day, it's an investment in your health. You don't want to cheap out on this and the cheap stuff tends not to last as long. Anyway, you invest some money in a good pan, a good rack. It's going to save you far more money in the long term. It's fairly simple and easy to understand which surfaces we should be cooking with and which ones can be dangerous. But things like microwaves, air fryers are not really understood by most people. These devices are dangerous and you shouldn't be standing near them, let alone using them to cook your food. Both microwaves and air fryers emit EMF, Radio Frequency Radiation and they deplete the nutrition of your food. So not only are you getting a blast of radiation by standing next to it when it's on, it's completely ruining your food. So I know I have a microwave here, my parents don't listen to me, they don't seem to care. I have not used a microwave in over 10 years. I would never use a microwave to heat my food. Same with an air fryer. To my understanding air fryers also emit EMF radiation and there's probably a bunch of other devices I don't know about that are emitting EMF radiation. Anything that uses this type of heating method to cook your food is ruining the nutrients, destroying the food completely. You should never be using them. I'm not going to go into the specifics and details of this. You guys can do your own research, make your own decisions, but to me a microwave is not necessary for anything. If you want to heat some food up, you can just put it in the oven for a few minutes and it'll probably taste better too. And that applies to many health topics in general. If you simply avoid certain things, you don't have to worry about what the negatives are. It does help to convince people and give other people an understanding of why they should be avoiding certain things. But I've spoken to vegans that have had half their teeth rotting out. This one girl had 18 cavities in a year after going vegan and she still wouldn't listen to me. Some people really don't care. So just make yourself healthy, try not to worry too much about other people if they're not willing to listen. So now I'd like to go over other kitchen equipment that I've found to be very useful. And since I do eat meat every day, we're just gonna look at knives really and what I cook with every day. Very minimal, very easy. The only prep I do every day is cutting meat. So these are the knives that I use. These are two chef's knives and here I have a scimitar knife. All of these are really cheap. I'll tell you guys where I got them later. But the reason I like cheap knives is because I don't have to worry about ruining the edge when I'm sharpening it and I'm not fixated on being a perfectionist, spending like 20, 30 minutes sharpening each knife. And when you buy really expensive, like two, three, $400 Japanese knife, I feel like it's too stressful to maintain it. So I got this thing recently. It's called AccuSharp and you run the knife through this several times with pretty high pressure. It scrapes the hell out of the knife but it gets the knife sharp temporarily and it's a very quick way to sharpen the knife. Before I got this thing, I would just use the steels. So this one and then the ceramic one. The steel gets the blade a little bit honed and then the ceramic makes it a bit finer, makes it a little bit sharper. But with just the sharpening steels, you can't really resharpen a knife. You have to take it to a stone once in a while. With this AccuSharp thing, I don't have to use the stones at all with these cheap knives. If you do decide to get wet stones, you need different ones. The first stone I have is a very coarse grit. It's an 800, 400. This would be to pretty much redo the whole edge. Then I have a 3000, 8000 and I believe this one is a 2000, 10,000. So you would do the 400, you do the 800, then you do the 2000, the 3000, the 8000 and you don't really have to do the 10,000 but if you guys wanna look up sharpening videos, maybe I'll do one myself. This is very time consuming. You have to let the stones sit in oil or water and it's just an awful lot of work to maintain your knives. Unless you're a professional chef, I wouldn't worry too much about this, especially when you have cheap knives like I do. I like the wood cutting board but it's not that great for the dishwasher so you could use plastic as well. It doesn't really matter to me. I did wanna show you guys these stainless steel skewers. I really like this for grilling stuff like liver, heart, small pieces of meat, throw them on the grill with these skewers. It makes it very easy but that's really all I use every day. Thank you guys for joining me today. If you are interested in anything you've seen, I got a lot of the stuff on Amazon so I'll put it on my Amazon shop and then I will link that in the comments down below. If you guys could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon and share it if you can. If you guys are in need of food to be using on your new cookware, check out Frankie's Free Range Meat providing you guys with high quality nutrient-dense animal foods at an affordable price. Go to frankiesfreerangemeat.com, check out our grass-fed beef, our high quality raw cheeses, organ meats, beef fat, pemmican, jerky, a bunch of high quality products that you guys will love. Thanks again for joining me and enjoy the rest of your day.