I find any debate about cook and bakeware coatings amusing. The heating of carbohydrates, whether by baking, toasting, frying, et al, creates acrylamide, a known toxin and carcinogen. The darker the carb gets, the more acrylamide is created. It doesn't matter if the carb/starch is from wheat, potato, rice, corn or whatever, if it's a carb and it turns brown or darker, that cooking process creates significant amounts of acrylamide. The darker it gets, the more acrylamide is created and it's logarithmic in scale, not linear. Like crispy, brown French fries? Yeah, they're full of acrylamide.
Those Neapolitan pizzas with those black bubbles of charred carbohydrates, are filled with huge amounts of toxic, cancer causing acrylamide, yet people gladly chow down on them not worried a bit about it. Yet, mention non-stick coatings and many rush to the convo to bring up toxicity. The few molecules of PTFEs or PFOAs we may be ingesting from cooking and bakeware is minimal compared to the massive amount of acrylamide we consume daily from cooked, baked, and fried carbs of any kind. Amusing it is.
All carbs when heated produce acrylamide. Copious amounts as it gets darker. So do most charred foods, even proteins, though to a much lesser extent. Those back yard burgers with the charred bits, or those smash burgers with the crispy edges, or that charred pepperoni or cheese, all create acrylamide too, though considerably less than what carbs can create.
As with so many things in life that could be bad for us, it's the amount, not the exposure that is usually harmful. We all know that ethyl alcohol is a toxin and will kill us if consumed in large amounts. We put it in our gas tanks, and yet we also drink it as wine, beer, and liquor, which we gladly consume in small amounts. Ethyl alcohol is present even after cooking, in any food product that is fermented or cured. It never fully cooks away unless the food is incinerated. If I were to send any baked pizza/yeast dough to a lab to test for ethyl alcohol, they would find it. It's in there, it's toxic, it gets consumed, yet causes no harm at that minuscule level.
As with most things that are toxic, it's the dosage or amount ingested that is relevant, not simply that it's toxic. What we don't know is the toxic level in humans of bio-accumulators like PFOAs, which are forever chemicals and are toxic. Lloyd pans are PFOA and PTFE free, so that's not an issue with them. Unlike chemicals such as ethyl alcohol which is eliminated from our bodies, some chemicals never leave us. They're in us right now and will always be there. We we don't know is at what accumulation level, if any, that they will cause us harm. Folks have been ingesting them for decades and we haven't really seen anything bad happen to the general population, so I'm thinking that we need to ingest a lot of them to cause us harm. I've always lived with the philosophy that the stress of worrying about something toxic will likely kill me faster than the chemical on its own. Live life, worry less, live longer is my motto.
Folks worried about toxins would be better served by worrying about that baked pastry and dark roasted coffee that they consume for breakfast most days, rather than if a coated cooking pan is going to harm them. The more you know...
Enjoy your Lloyd pans. They're great, and there are more important things in life to worry about than baking pans.
So are the coatings used on the pans scientifically established as being harmful to human health? (no lab-animal results please,,, and no "linked to", or "possible risk" type of things either). Is it a clear-cut direct causation?
I'm asking because I just recently ordered 2 Lloyd pans with PSTK.
