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Comment by game-of-throws | Hacker News Reader

The world is being destroyed, but at least for a few beautiful moments our nonstick pans were a few cents cheaper

Please don't take HN in high-indignation/low-information directions, or post snarky one-liners.

It dumbs down discussion, as well taking it off topic and turning it nasty. Important topics deserve better than that. Unimportant topics too, actually.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier. The war on fats caused substantial damage to the health and environment

> Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier.

I bet that the butter itself is worse for your health than the minuscule PFAS you are getting from your pan.

> stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick'

Except it isn’t. Try letting melted cheese, or pretty much any starch (pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc) sit in stainless for a while and then see how non-stick it is. It will glue itself to stainless but on non-stick it will slide right off.

I’m not arguing in favor of non-stick, and avoid it when possible, but we can’t also be making inaccurate claims either.

Well, there is also the method of seasoning cast iron cookware.

Cast iron and stainless are so completely different that this comment doesn’t belong in this thread.

Also, cast iron, even when seasoned, would still stick quite a bit in the above scenario (and I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to cook starches like that in cast iron).

I don't think "the war on fats" is to blame for the rise of PFAS-based nonstick pans. Have you actually tried using both? A world of a difference

Also, vegetable oils are incredibly high in omega-6's which compete with omega-3's for the same enzymes. In general the literature suggests we should be consuming about a 4:1 ratio for Omega-3's to Omega-6 fatty acids. Corn-based oil, for example, has a 1:60 ratio

I think avoiding excessive vegetable oil intake is still a good idea

The nonstick pans today still have PFAS. They removed PFOA but there are hundreds of similar chemicals that they can use instead, which reason would dictate are just as toxic but which so happen to have not been safety tested yet

Interesting: this sounds like BPA-free plastics -- a lot of these have BPB and BPS which animal and cell-line studies have found just as concerning, but hey you can slap a "BPA-free" sticker on them!

Yes it's quite similar

what do you think the feasibility of making the laws a whitelist rather than a blacklist would be? they did it with drugs in the UK

It's a complex issue and I'm not here to advocate one solution or another. However, there is important information that the public ought to be aware of

I’m not asking you to advocate

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap —- Leonard Cohen

Nonstick pans are a negligible source of PFAS compared to various plastic products. For example some paper bowls are 25% PFAS.

Think my unrealized stock gains are safe to drink?

Maybe capitalism has some serious side effects

Thank god my preferred economic model doesn't use chemicals

It's not about the use of chemicals as such but the necessity of consumption for the sake of consumption.

Thanks, Monsanto!

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