Leaded gasoline wasn't fully phased out in the US until 1996, not sure about other countries. The millennial age bracket starts somewhere around the birth year 1982.
Apparently you can still buy leaded race fuels in the US today, wtf? Ban that shit. I was watching a video yesterday of someone why brought their time-attack racecar to Australia and they had to retune it for unleaded because leaded is banned there. I was blown away they were using leaded fuel in the first place.
Oh it definitely happens. I’m a young millennial and I have a friend my age who deals with mental issues because he ate lead paint leftover in their old house as a child. Lead was so prevalent at one point that getting rid of it all isn’t as simple as flipping a switch.
Edit: [wasn’t -> isn’t] There does not in fact exist a switch that we can now flip to remove lead. Thanks @Imgonnatrythis.
I was in my early teens in the 90s when leaded gas was finally banned in the US. Furthermore, lead doesn’t degrade, only slowly disperse. People born in the early 80s still got a hefty dose of lead. Yay us.
Also known as PTFE, it is a plastic substance that has an insanely low coefficient of friction and is thus incredibly fucking useful for so many things. And much like the last weirdly good at doing everything substance (asbestos) it turns out it really should not have been put in everything, but its probably not quite as bad as asbestos.
PFOA was the surfactant that was used to keep Teflon in an emulsion during coating processes. It was replaced in the 2000s with an alternate product branded GenX that was supposed to be safer, but in actuality ended up being more toxic than PFOA.
In either case, the main exposure risk is to those surfactant chemicals, typically due to groundwater contamination near a plant or via occupational exposure. Once in a finished coating, Teflon itself is essentially inert unless you heat it up several hundred degrees, so existing nonstick pans and other finished products don’t pose too much risk.
Once in a finished coating, Teflon itself is essentially inert unless you heat it up several hundred degrees
Thank goodness it isn’t used in cookware! 😬
Having kept birds in the past, I don’t believe it’s truly safe to cook with. People using it as directed have had their birds drop dead from it because their lungs are so much more sensitive. If it’s enough to affect them it’s very possible it’s just subacute in humans in the short term but causes health problems long term.
Also, it’s plastic. You can’t convince me it’s great to cook on top of that. Plus it doesn’t last the way stainless steel or cast iron does, you’re basically buying it to throw away in a couple of years.
Don’t get me wrong, I kept birds as well and I’m aware of the dangers of overheating Teflon pans around them – the same issues arise with 3D printers with PTFE-lined heatbreaks, by the by – but with some caution, in common cooking use those pans aren’t going to see the sorts of temperatures required to start decomposing the coating. Once it starts to wear out, certainly I’d say dump the Teflon cookware and get some stainless and/or cast-iron replacements, but a knee-jerk overreaction to throw out a sound pan is only going to make the plastic waste problem worse in the short term. Plastic the stuff may be, but (again, unless heated quite a bit) it’s one of the least chemically-reactive substances we know of.
Pans on a stove can easily reach sufficient temperatures to break down the Teflon, especially when empty or left unattended. You don’t have to have a ridiculously high temperature oven for it to be a risk. If you’ve ever had coconut oil or olive oil smoke in your pan then you’ve probably exceeded the recommended use temperature for Teflon.
Typical use case includes people forgetting a pan for a few minutes because these are used by human beings, not robots, or using it to stir fry (which requires high heat) because they coat fucking woks in that shit now.
Even when you use them for their intended use, such as stir frying in a wok, they can reach temperatures that are normal for cooking but unsafe for Teflon. And it is extremely easy to forget a pan on the stove for a minute, and that should factor into whether or not a product is considered safe.
For example, pressure cookers have to have fail safe mechanisms, even though you could just as easily say anyone using it should just use it properly and they wouldn’t explode.
Yes, by either raising your own farm animals, buying dairy and meat products from known and truly eco producers or going vegan. The last option, though, might get you into another category of chemicals and/or GMOs if you don’t carefully select the products and categories based on labeling and nutritional values and knowledge
I came to say this. I have also noticed a strong trend amongst people from each generation for health.
Teflon was introduced in 1938, when my grandfather was 11. In the 1955, when my father was born, is the last time that we have Teflon untainted blood from. At some point between 1955 and 1985 when I was born, Teflon proliferated to the point that it was being found in every blood sample around the world.
So my grandfather lived ~40-50 years without being massively contaminated with Teflon, my father probably got to adulthood, and I have never been without it. Now an anecdotal sample that follows a larger trend. My grandfather is in his 90’s with pretty good health and is still going pretty strong. My father and both of his siblings are in their 60’s-70’s and all have failing health, and I know so few people in my own age range that are actually healthy without autoimmune disease or other systemic issue that I couldn’t fill a high school auditorium with them.
I have seen the exact opposite as, aside from obesity problems, each generation I’ve seen has had significantly higher life expectancy than the last.
I know multiple people now who have outlived the short life expectancy their health complications in the 80s supposedly gave them. I know a few families who have people living longer than anyone else in their blood line ever has. The heart and lung problems that killed off my grandparents have been dealt with now and my parents and my generation are already outliving them and far healthier at our ages.
This is all thanks to great medical advancement, of course, but the point is this isn’t some dire threat that warrants doom and gloom, but another medical hurdle for us to be aware of and work out like we have all the others.
Yeah teflon is most dangerous for the people manufacturing it, and not really for people using teflon products. It’s not unhealthy to wear a watch with radium dials, but you don’t want to be the lady who painted said dial
Scientists are still learning about the effects of PFAS on humans, but studies show these chemicals can harm different systems in the body.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says exposure to PFAS may lead to higher risk for kidney or testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels, and damage to the liver and immune system.
My hospital sent an email out that for unknown reasons liver disease is on the rise for non drinkers and people without diabetes.
Well it also looks like PFAS is a big group of chemicals, and brand name Teflon now uses a specific version called PTFE which they (can you trust them?) claim is not as bad as PFAS.
But even if that’s true, the production of it still produces tons of known toxic waste.
Ya know… I think my original notion I got from Johnny Harris…. Whom I’ve actually grown a bit skeptical of lately.
I switched over to ceramic pans, specifically the Ayesha Curry ones, but who knows if that will be bad in the future. I tried the Caphalon ceramic and those were horrible. The nonstick pans are bad for you over a certain temperature where it breaks down. There’s an excellent movie called Dark Waters about the original lawsuit and that man is a hero.
The problem is that it’s so inert, it becomes impossible to remove from a contaminated environment or particularly a person’s blood stream.
The amount that inevitably gets caught in your blood will just stay in your body forever, settling down in a critical organ like your brain or kidneys and giving you cancer or some other horrible problem.
We’re running on theory alone here, but if thats true, then its too inert to be reabsorbed by your kidneys and therefore would pass into your urine and leave your body that way. Also how is it causing cancer if it’s inert?
We are definitely NOT in theory territory here, there have been studies and reports of people directly suffering from the effects of PFAS, what we are not clear on is how it’s interacting with our bodies.
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