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Comment by resoluteteeth | Hacker News Reader

I don't think most people are actually doing really high temp wok cooking at home regardless of ethnic background. My impression is that, while woks are more common for home cooking in china (not chinese americans, mind you), even there home cooking is usually not done at the high temperatures that restaurants use.

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It's easy, incredibly easy, to overheat cookingware unintentionally. Add oil to a pan/wok that's overheated and it decomposes. Additionally, if the cookingware is coated with Teflon, above 300 °C this degrades into toxic compounds and can lead to "teflon flu" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever

Asian-Americans specifically have higher levels of PTFE in their blood too:

https://pfasproject.com/2023/08/25/asian-americans-have-much...

You can buy nonstick wok-shaped pans but real woks that would be used for high temperature cooking are usually not nonstick. The original assertion that I was responding to was suggesting that the cause of the higher lung cancer rates in asian americans might be because of high temperature wok cooking.

I have no idea if nonstick pans are associated with higher lung cancer rates but even if they are I have no reason to think that asian americans are more likely to use nonstick pans, so the fact that it is easy to overheat nonstick pans in general might not explain asian americans having higher lung cancer rates.

It doesn't have to be super-high-temp wok cooking. Just using a wok and a normal residential gas stove is not great for you. Even at home stove temps stir frying can throw up a fair amount of oil aerosols. And it potentially means standing over the stove with the gas going on high, even if it's not going to get as hot as a restaurant wok. The gas is bad for you, the aerosols are probably bad for you. It's plausible Asian-Americans use this sort of cooking method more often than non-Asians.

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