 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. They metal shows in an application where safety and hygiene are 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 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. A study of diets from around the world, while fish and seafood were major contributors of the perfluoroalcohol 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 perfluorohexane 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.