Nonstick Pan Safety ANSWERS

some of the chemicals inside this non-stick pan could be hazardous to human health also the chemicals used to make it back at the factory however that doesn't necessarily mean this is dangerous to cook with in fact the weight of scientific evidence and expert opinion is on the side of this being quite safe to cook with as long as you don't get it way too hot and even if you did that it probably wouldn't be a very big deal unless you already have a cardio respiratory disease or if you are a bird but it's not all good news bad chemicals used in the production process of pans like these are everywhere in our environment there probably in your body right now whether you cook with one of these or not details field trip to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Durham North Carolina where dr. me nihuang is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Toxicology program hey does she cook with Teflon yes I do because I'm really lazy and I don't feel like soaking my pans and the in the sink just to scrape off the stuff off the bottom scientists they're just like us so what is Teflon well Teflon is a brand name for the rest of this video we're going to try to refer to the chemical at the heart of all such pans PTFE yeah and so that's basically just a carbon chain with a ton of fluorines all around it and it makes it because of the way the chemical is it makes it very resistant to reacting with other sorts of chemicals or dissolving other chemicals which makes it a very good nonstick coating and that's the same factor that makes these things pretty safe to cook with the manufacturers may tell you to replace them the second you scratch them and they start to chip but as I mentioned before the chemical structure makes it pretty inert and so if you were to ingest a chip of your Teflon pan that would probably go through a system pretty harmlessly good because I'm guessing I probably ate that ship there a lot of manufacturers also tell you to never put your nonstick pans in the dishwasher dr. Huang says that probably doesn't have anything to do with safety I'd imagine their main concern would be just might degrade the coating faster and so that would decrease the quality of their pans and so to avoid unhappy customers they I recommend not putting the dishwasher or getting new ones after they scratch oh plus I'm sure that encourages people that buy more free aha you know about ten years ago I decided I'm gonna stop tearing my non-stick pans to shreds I'm gonna get a really nice expensive one and I'ma treat her right I literally scratched it the very first time I used it nonstick pan scratch and ship it's what they do funny enough when you make a chemical that doesn't stick to things it's hard to make it stick to things like the bottom of the pan I strongly believe that my possessions should serve me I should not serve them so my approach these last few years has been to buy relatively inexpensive nonstick pans use them abuse them and just replace them every few years there actually is one health risk posed by PTFE s in the kitchen and that is a very rare disease called polymer fume fever it's a thing that can happen if you overheat your pans we'll talk more about that in a minute real quick let me thank the sponsor of this video hello fresh some people might think Oh Adam Ragusa he's a big-time internet cook now he'd never use a meal kit delivery service not dude I'm a sucker for a kit of any kind they sent you these meal bags and each one has exactly what you need to knock out a delicious healthy plate in like a half hour all in precise pre measured quantities look at that hotel minibar bottle of vinegar adorable and recyclable like most of this the instructions are simple and easy to follow but it's still real cooking and the result is really satisfying without hellofresh I rarely have the bandwidth to produce a traditionally square meal you know a protein a starch and a veg but there's other styles too they got vegetarian calorie smart family friendly even craft burgers hellofresh is flexible you can keep it basic or add signs like garlic bread or dessert and hellofresh is cheap now from $6.99 per serving you want to try this I can get you eight meals for free that's $80 off your first month of hellofresh just go to hellofresh comm and enter my offer code Adam or goose iya 80 that's in the description okay the so called Teflon flew this really is a thing that you can get from working with these pans if you get them really really hot they will start to vaporize so it'll come off of the pans and then if you breathe it in you can basically get a little flu fever chills that kind of thing but in most known cases it only lasts a day or two and then that's it researchers believe it only poses a serious health risk to people who are already sick and/or people who breathe in a ton of the fumes also yes birds non-stick pans do kill birds that is a thing that veterinarians talk about now how hot do you need to get this thing before you risk the flu this is that like temperatures way higher than I presume most people are using these are temperatures that would burn your food and you would clearly see some degradation of the pain that you're using at the temperatures where this happens degradation like say this this is a picture of the pan involved in one of the tiny handful of documented cases of anybody in their kitchen giving themselves polymer fume fever this happened in 2012 a 29 year old guy in Japan put some water on the boil for pasta but he forgot about it he fell asleep he woke up 5 hours later and found his room full of some kind of smoke he grabbed the pan he ran it to the sink and then when he poured water into it an explosive vapor came out from the surface of the pan which he breathed in so that's kind of a worst case scenario in the kitchen right and what happened to him he had a fever he had a coffin he was a little bit short of breath it was way better by the next day and by the third day he was back to normal here's a chart showing documented cases of polymer fume fever in the US when it says four in 2012 that's not short for 4000 that's four and dr. Huang says most of those cases are not people working in their kitchens it's people working in factories where workers are you know putting the coating on themselves and they're very much exposed to it so our cases are in that realm and there have been a couple cases in the general population maybe two I think in the past decade that's been recorded right so we don't know hadn't been recorded indeed I get a little sick all the time and if my pan were to blame I'm not sure that I would put two and two together there are a lot of estimates about what temperature will cause a nonstick coating to become dangerous most experts would say you shouldn't take them past 500 degrees Fahrenheit but they don't start to break down until about 570 Fahrenheit and they don't really get going until 662 degrees Fahrenheit let's do an experiment nonstick pan goes under the broiler and I'll take its temperature with my fancy infrared thermometer it took more than 20 minutes for this to reach the danger zone and that's with the pan being empty if you have food in there it's gonna absorb a lot of the heat when I did my pan pizza recipe from the other day in my nonstick the exposed rim of the pan wasn't anywhere near the danger zone by the time the pizza was cooked now up on the burner the story is a little different when I put this on high it hit the danger zone in about 4 minutes so don't do that I might occasionally use high heat with this pan but only with lots of food in it you don't want to preheat this empty for the purposes of say searing a steak and there'd be no reason to because if you properly sear a steak in a normal pan it's not gonna stick this is more for gentle delicate things like eggs and even with these experiments I did the pans were just starting to get overheated they didn't break down visibly at all and dr. Huang thinks you'd probably have to get your face right in there and breathe in those fumes to risk getting sick now before we finish there's something more serious to discuss for many years manufacturers used a chemical called PFOA P foa in the process of making these P FOA is bad stuff it's a possible carcinogen and it lasts for forever in the environment there have been many lawsuits involving people who lived near the factories getting really sick but it really is a very minimal amount of residual P FOA or other portfolio chemicals in non-stick pans like you know thousands of folds levels lower than what is observed in the water or food so good news it's not in the pan bad news it's everywhere else it's in the water and it's probably in your blood right now industry has been phasing out P FOA for this reason but there's concern about the chemical process they're now using instead so is that a reason to not buy non-stick pans to avoid supporting an industry that is introducing these chemicals into our environment well maybe but the thing is nonstick coatings are everywhere this is just the place where you're most aware of them they're in electrical cables cosmetics popcorn bags dental floss basically any stain or water resistant fabric carpets furniture clothes these coatings are everywhere and so are the potentially hazardous chemicals used to produce them that is a fact of modern life whether you cook in one of these or not

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 414,678

Rating: 4.905571 out of 5

Keywords: non stick pan, non stick, non-stick pans, safe pans, are non stick pans safe, non toxic cookware, non toxic pans, nonstick pans, non stick pans safe, non stick pans side effects, safe pans to cook with, teflon pan, teflon pans health hazard, teflon pans danger, teflon pans toxic, teflon pan test, cooking, cookware, teflon, kitchen, pans, PTFE, PFOA, pfoa contamination, Teflon flu, polymer fumes, dupont, chemours

Id: 5FNNKhVoUu8

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2019