Six months ago, I moved to California from the East coast with my girlfriend to chase some opportunities out west. When we signed for the keys to our new apartment, our living space was bare and we both knew one of the first things we had to do, after unpacking, was to go to a departments store for the basic home furnishings. She had brought plates and silverware, but we needed cookware.

So we’re in the cookware aisle looking at frying pans. She goes for the cast iron frying pan, and I say something like “honey, don’t you want non-stick? Those iron frying pans are such a pain in the ass.”
“But non-stick frying pans give you cancer, honey,” she replied. At first I didn’t believe her. I had used non-stick frying pans all my life. I did however remember my mother warning me not to scrape the non-stick pan with forks or knives or anything that would scrape off the non-stick coating.

Well, as it turns out, that non-stick coating is some nasty shit that you do NOT want to put into your body. Here’s what I found out:

  • Non-stick coating was developed in the 30’s by Du Pont
  • It is made from a chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA
  • PFOA has repeatedly shown in laboratories to cause cancer, liver damage, growth defects, immune-system damage and death to small animals.
  • In 2004, Du Pont had an Erin-Brokovich type case where they were accused of poisoning the water supply with PFOAs, causing birth defects among other health hazards. DuPont paid US$300 million as an out-of-court settlement to around 50,000 residents who lived near its West Virginia plant.
  • DuPont has agreed to phase-out the chemical completely by 2015, and they are classifying the chemical on par with mercury and lead, a poison that remains in your body forever.
  • Trace levels of PFOAs are found in almost every American.

So what I get from this is that those bastards at DuPont made a really useful product with a really toxic chemical, tried as hard as it could to confuse and blur the studies that showed how bad it was and then signed a quiet deal to phase it out over a few decades after they had made enormous piles of cash. The Cigarette companies lied to us that cigarettes were harmful to our health, but they’re not taking cigarettes off the market like they are with non-stick.

The Equivalent of using Non-Stick frying pans…

…eating your food off a lead plate, and using mercury as dipping sauce.

The really sick thing is that if you go to a store to purchase a frying pan, there is absolutely no warning labels on the non-stick coated pans. If I had known how real the threat was with non-stick cookware, Teflon or any other name it is known by, I never would have used it. But now I have a level of PFOA in my body that is going to be there forever. I just gasp at the tragedy that people are still using non-stick cookware, who are unaware of the dangers because the whole thing has been quieted up.

So listen to me, because right now you have a responsibility. All your friends and family who probably use non-stick frying pans need to be made aware of how toxic they are to their health. Tell them to throw out all their non-stick pans and get new pans without the nonstick coating. Call them, email them, let them know that you care about them and that their health is at risk each time they continue using this toxic piece of cookware.

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