an interesting thing is that though birds have super-efficient lungs, they can be very fragile.
As any parrot owner knows, if you overheat a teflon pan, all the birds inside your house will die. So bird owners use stainless steel. There are other non-stick pans available, but it's really hard to wade through the marketing to figure out if overheating will kill the pet that's been in your family for years or even decades.
unrelated, the name of this article made me wonder if it was about thin air and lift, thinking how helicopters can't fly over everest.
But a mountain like everest might have a huge amount of updrafts to lift birds into the sky.
If you've ever stopped at an ridge overlook along california highway 1, you might see something curious. the ridges are bird-superhighways. the ocean air hits the cliffs and deflects upwards, and this updraft lets birds "surf" up and down the coast. So if you stand there and are patient, you'll see lines of gulls cruise by going north or south without flapping.
I think the wrong assumption here is that we humans are completely fine with teflon overheating on the other hand. PFAS chemicals released really do mess with just about everything and anything in our body, the results just aren't seen on short time scales.
We really should be taking steps towards a worldwide ban of this yet another asbestos-ass miracle material which sounds too good to be true because well, it is.
Alcohol kills humans in relatively small quantities as well, and it would certainly kill a bird with significantly less. Chocolate makes dogs incredibly sick as well, while not having the same effect on humans.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't ban PFAS. They're proven to be dangerous to humans, and we should absolutely be concerned about long-term effects. It's just that "it kills a bird" isn't a justification for banning something. I'm under the impression that burned food and smoke isn't great for you either; it's possible that the trade-off between a dirty oven and increased PFAS exposure is acceptable.
Ultimately it depends on the magnitude of the danger, and I don't know enough about airborne PFAS to know if it warrants a blanket ban on any products with Teflon.
I'd be open to that viewpoint. Assuming something to be bad based on an animal trial is generally how we approve medicines, so there's precedent for it.
I will say that we should be wary of banning products based on potential long-term effects with unknown magnitude. Knowing where to draw that line is tough.
>Chocolate makes dogs incredibly sick as well, while not having the same effect on humans.
Few people know this, but the thing in chocolate that kills dogs, theobromine, acts as a caffeine-like stimulant in human beings but with a much longer half-life. Although human livers are much more able to deal with it than dogs, this could conceivably be causing human problems in people who often eat a lot of chocolate less than seven hours before bed.
>I don't know enough about airborne PFAS to know if it warrants a blanket ban on any products with Teflon.
If you look at the CDC website, PFAS has a rap sheet a mile long. You should probably just clean your pans. If you can afford it, get a reverse osmosis system [3], they are very good at removing PFAS.
The rap sheet you've posted seems to suport my general idea. It states that PFAS has been dangerous in lab animal trials using levels of PFAS that are much higher than environmental levels.
It seems there have been some investigations in humans, but to be honest the effects seem largely similar to a lot of other legal substances. Alcohol is dangerous to pregnant women and infants, a fatty burger can raise cholesterol, etc.
That is a cause for concern, and I've conceded this in my original comment. However, it's not the strongest evidence for a blanket ban.
Or, alternatively, we could treat this as strong enough evidence of an effect and ban many other substances that we use every single day. I can think of plenty of foods that raise cholesterol, and I can certainly think of plenty that pregnant women aren't allowed to eat because of low birth weight fears or other complications.
> this could conceivably be causing human problems in people who often eat a lot of chocolate less than seven hours before bed
Well so will the actual caffeine.
Still, "not having the same effect on humans" is pretty misleading. It's maybe 4x more potent in a dog. Body weight is a much bigger factor. Not many people are going to eat "one ounce of milk chocolate per pound of body weight" or the equivalent dose of darker chocolate.
> Alcohol kills humans in relatively small quantities as well
In absolute quantities it's less toxic than fructose, paracetamol or THC. It's among least toxic substances found in nature. Almost no one dies from acute toxicity of alcohol - almost all alcohol-related deaths are due to accidents and chronic toxicity (long term exposure to toxicant).
The point is that quantities of alcohol that hurt/kill birds aren't illegal, because those quantities aren't dangerous enough to humans to warrant legal action. It's similar to how we don't accept animal trials as all the evidence required to approve a new drug.
Some things kill animals and not humans. Some quantities of substances kill animals and not humans. Knowing that a product kills your bird is cause for investigation or concern, but not a reason for a blanket ban.
Dihydrogen monoxide kills 3.9k in the US every year and can kill pretty much every living thing if consumed in large enough quantities. It's crazy that we consume the stuff on a daily basis.
To me, this indicates that FDA testing / validation needs to be heavily modified.
Teflon is 100%, perfectly safe, as long as it never overheats. It is completely inert, causes no problems, can be eaten, etc.
As you say, when it overheats? It becomes toxic. I read some of the FDA docs referenced during approval, and it was along the lines of "As long as overheating does not occur".
They knew.
But then ran with the premise of "Citizens won't accidentally overheat their pan!". It really only takes a second! A pan on the stove, a distraction (kids, phone, a loud noise outside, whatever), a simple mistake, and BAM pan is overheated.
I'd say every teflon pan in use is toxic, essentially.
I don't know if the approval process has changed or not, but it seems like depending upon people to have 100% perfect adherence to pan heat levels is a bit much...
What other substances are approved this way? Frankly, I think any non-stick substance is suspicious, and use stainless steel.
The trick? Never use soap to wash it. Just use water, soak if needed, and if you can't get it all off? The next cooking will just be all the tastier. :P
Let the grease soak in, let the oils soak in, it does season a bit.
Once gasses have been released, the chemical structure of telfon has changed. Literally, this is how it becomes toxic.
It takes very little time, just one little mistake, and that pan is now no longer inert teflon, but instead toxic teflon. Some have suggested that teflon should literally be banned, as a result of this.
Some even regularly cook at temperatures which are dangerous for teflon, eg > 600F, when searing a steak for example.
But I guess my whole point is, we 100% know it can become toxic. We also know that mistakes during cooking, or people not being aware, can cause this transformation. And it's a thing we put our food in, for crying out loud!
I don't think one can overstate how ... wrong it is, to use any non-stick coated pans. It's just not worth it.
Well, sorry, but PAHs are toxic and cause cancer - there are lots of toxins involved in the process of cooking. The food itself is ridden with AGEs, which are toxic and impossible to get rid - "thank" them for diabetes, dark spots, macular degeneration, aging in general, and all kinds of chronic disease.
The actual teflon, the coating becomes toxic. Permanently.
It is an inert, non-organic reactive substance prior to being damaged. After, its molecular structure changes, it is bio-reactive and toxic.
So no, the solution isn't better ventilation, even for some of the questionable things you mentioned. And yes, you attitude before was "meh, gonna happen anyway".
Oh, it surely is. And cooking methods are source of toxins, too! Most cooked food is rich in exogenous AGEs, and do accumulate just like the endogenous do, and there's no known way to clean them up. Pancreatic cancer is blamed on burnt red meat, but people just like eating toxic food. Cooking in pans, teflon-coated or ceramic-coated is toxic anyway, but, I agree, to different degrees. Stainless steel cookware loads you with iron, which also has an upper limit beyond, which it becomes toxic and generates ROS.
Last week, on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver talks about PFAS, which was very interesting. Not only teflon, but all kind of repellent fabrics like Gore-tex:
I’m not saying he’s wrong — I have neither the education nor the experience nor the time to do so — but as a word of caution: One single atom in a different place, or a chiral flip of the molecule as a whole, can radically change the biological response of a chemical.
H2O is good; remove one atom, get explosive H2; add one atom get the bleach H2O2.
For chirality: S-penicillamine is an anti-arthritic, R-penicillamine is highly toxic[0] (I was going to use thalidomide as my example, but that turns out to be something which changes between both chiralities inside your own body).
If you're worried about goretex, switch to Columbia outdry, it doesn't use or rely on dwr so I'm guessing whatever plastics its using is pretty stable.
If you’re in the Bay Area, you can stop by Fort Funston and see humans using this effect as well.
In the hang gliding world, ridge lift is a wonderful phenomenon that enables one to stay airborne almost indefinitely, with much better predictability than thermal soaring. The lift band is well defined by the incoming wind and upward deflection. When you’re done, just turn inland and exit the lift band.
Another interesting thing that links with the latter part of the article - this was exactly why canaries were used in coal mines. The lungs of birds rapidly absorb anything in the air, meaning they'd die before the coal miners.
The main reason was to protect against carbon monoxide. Humans do not feel it and there is no body alert, like we have for carbon dioxide for instance.
Carbon dioxide is the only substance for which we have such an alert. (Although there is another kind of alert for substances which smell bad. Most toxic substances don't smell bad.)
Which is why it's horrifying that CO2 asphyxiation is the "euthanasia" method of choice for everything from lab animals to livestock. We've managed to select the one gas that inflicts excruciating pain.
At a guess, I'd say we selected that gas so that, in the event of a safety failure, human operators would notice they couldn't breathe, and flee. It's a pretty good reason.
Assuming the humans are always in a ventilated area, though, nitrogen seems better along several dimensions.
Protip: Get some carbon steel pans (can't go wrong with de Buyer brand) or good old cast iron.
Though, even with teflon gone from your kitchen, you've still got to be careful with other toxic fume sources such as overheated oil or the wax coating that most new pans come with :)
As for the pans: Just use them as you would any other pan and after a while you'll find them to be just as non-stick as any one of those overpriced poison pans. Don't bother with flaxseed oil as people on the internet like to recommend, soapy water is fine as long as you dry the pans well afterwards, and if you want to use metal cooking utensils in your metal pan don't let anyone stop you.
I only see skillets on Amazon, but I lucked into a $50 wok at Asian Family Market in Seattle. Sorry I can't remember the company name, no English, there was a picture of a chef on it.
I try to tell everyone I know that cooks to buy anodized aluminum. No "seasoning", no scratching, very non-stick, heats rapidly, dishwasher safe, light weight. It's like a miracle material but it's just aluminum.
efficiency and fragility seem to go together (see our current global container shipping fiasco and our just-in-time production world)
The life at the deepest points of the ocean also seem quite fragile.
Also, "canary in the coal mine". Canaries were sent into coal mines to detect carbon monoxide and other gases because they were more sensitive than humans. The bird would die before humans, giving an early warning.
As any parrot owner knows, if you overheat a teflon pan, all the birds inside your house will die. So bird owners use stainless steel. There are other non-stick pans available, but it's really hard to wade through the marketing to figure out if overheating will kill the pet that's been in your family for years or even decades.
unrelated, the name of this article made me wonder if it was about thin air and lift, thinking how helicopters can't fly over everest.
But a mountain like everest might have a huge amount of updrafts to lift birds into the sky.
If you've ever stopped at an ridge overlook along california highway 1, you might see something curious. the ridges are bird-superhighways. the ocean air hits the cliffs and deflects upwards, and this updraft lets birds "surf" up and down the coast. So if you stand there and are patient, you'll see lines of gulls cruise by going north or south without flapping.