The Dangers of Teflon Pans

www.naturalpath.com: The non-stick coating popular on frying pans may, in fact, be an unsavory way to cook.

Though you may love your cookware for its reduced need for added fat, consider this: emerging studies are proving that Teflon-coated metal cooking implements, especially when used at high temperatures, may be leaking toxins into dinner.

The problem is that when the surface gets scratched, tiny amounts of inert plastic and leached aluminum cling to cooked food, with far more toxic results than an extra spoonful of cooking oil. Perhaps more worrisome, though, are the fumes and chemicals released, including highly toxic perfluorochemicals (PFCs/PFOAs) which result when nonstick coatings are heated to high temperatures. Studies by DuPont, the makers of Teflon, show that Teflon offgases particulate at 446°F. At 680°F Teflon pans release at least six toxic gases, including two carcinogens. DuPont acknowledges that the fumes can sicken people, a condition called “polymer fume fever”.

Far from your kitchen, the chemicals used to manufacture Teflon are also very persistent in the environment. Toxic chemicals released when cooking with Teflon-coated cookware can find their way into the air, water, soil, and our bodies. A 2005 study by the Environmental Working Group, in collaboration with Commonweal, found chemicals including perflourooctanoic acid (or PFOA), a known carcinogen, in the umbilical cord blood of US-born infants. Similarly, researchers at John Hopkins Medical Center released findings in 2006 that PFOA was present in umbilical cord blood of 99% of 300 newborns tested. Also, households with birds should note that Teflon fumes pose a particular hazard to their delicate systems.

In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency asked eight chemical makers, including DuPont, to voluntarily halt their use of PFOA. DuPont Co. said it will honor the request, reducing its use by 95% no later than 2010, and completely by 2015.

Teflon and other products containing PFCs are quite common. The Environmental Working Group’s website has a fairly comprehensive list of the products to avoid or to use with caution.

A Safe Alternative?

What’s the home cook to use instead? Stainless steel is considered a safe option by some, but it’s made by bonding layers of stainless steel with aluminum, which, with use, can also leach into food. Generally, glass, Pyrex, ceramic and ceramic-coated cast iron materials are all considered much safer alternatives to non-stick coated pots and pans. Cast iron cookware is a good alternative, as it is cheap, heats evenly and adds iron to the diet.

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Chemicals In Fast Food Hamburgers

(NaturalNews) If you’re in the beef business, what do you do with all the extra cow parts and trimmings that have traditionally been sold off for use in pet food? You scrape them together into a pink mass, inject them with a chemical to kill the e.coli, and sell them to fast food restaurants to make into hamburgers.

That’s what’s been happening all across the USA with beef sold to McDonald’s, Burger King, school lunches and other fast food restaurants, according to a New York Times article. The beef is injected with ammonia, a chemical commonly used in glass cleaning and window cleaning products.

This is all fine with the USDA, which endorses the procedure as a way to make the hamburger beef “safe” enough to eat. Ammonia kills e.coli, you see, and the USDA doesn’t seem to be concerned with the fact that people are eating ammonia in their hamburgers.

This ammonia-injected beef comes from a company called Beef Products, Inc. As NYT reports, the federal school lunch program used a whopping 5.5 million pounds of ammonia-injected beef trimmings from this company in 2008. This company reportedly developed the idea of using ammonia to sterilize beef before selling it for human consumption.

Aside from the fact that there’s ammonia in the hamburger meat, there’s another problem with this company’s products: The ammonia doesn’t always kill the pathogens. Both e.coli and salmonella have been found contaminating the cow-derived products sold by this company.

This came as a shock to the USDA, which had actually exempted the company’s products from pathogen testing and product recalls. Why was it exempted? Because the ammonia injection process was deemed so effective that the meat products were thought to be safe beyond any question.

What else is in there?

As the NYT reports, “The company says its processed beef, a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips, is used in a majority of the hamburger sold nationwide. But it has remained little known outside industry and government circles. Federal officials agreed to the company’s request that the ammonia be classified as a ‘processing agent’ and not an ingredient that would be listed on labels.”

Fascinating. So you can inject a beef product with a chemical found in glass cleaning products and simply call it a “processing agent” — with the full permission and approval of the USDA, no less! Does anyone doubt any longer how deeply embedded the USDA is with the beef industry?

Apparently, this practice of injecting fast food beef with ammonia has been a well-kept secret for years. I never knew this was going on, and this news appears to be new information to virtually everyone. The real shocker is that “a majority” of fast food restaurants use this ammonia-injected cow-derived product in their hamburger meat. It sort of makes you wonder: What else is in there that we don’t know about?

“School lunch officials and other customers complained about the taste and smell of the beef,” says the NYT. No wonder. It’s been pumped full of chemicals.

There are already a thousand reasons not to eat fast food. Make this reason number 1,001. Ammonia. It’s not supposed to be there.

You can get the same effect by opening a can of dog food made with beef byproducts, spraying it with ammonia, and swallowing it. That is essentially what you’re eating when you order a fast food burger.