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Teflon Pan Scare Comes with Sales Pitch
Trevor Butterworth, March 15, 2007
Popular wellness doctor, Dr. Joseph Mercola pitches his own line of cookware to save you from a non-existent threat.

Dr. Joseph Mercola is, according to the Vancouver Sun, “a leader in the U.S. wellness movement, New York Times bestselling author and founder of Mercola.com, the second most visited non-governmental health website after WebMD.”

So obviously, he must be reliable, right? Unfortunately, popularity on the Internet is not a proxy for accuracy. Take Mercola’s e-mail alert to subscribers this week about the dangers of cookware, which leads us to the following article:

“Despite your best intentions to eat healthier meals, exercise regularly, drink pure water, and use key supplements, something scary could be preventing you from achieving your peak wellness.

And it lurks in your kitchen cabinets ...

Funny as it may sound, that scary "something " could be your pots and pans! Yes, the cookware you use to prepare your food might be downright dangerous to your health.

This may not be a new issue for you. As I continue to discuss the dangers of some types of cookware on the site, one of the most common questions I receive is "What type of cookware do you recommend?".

(Emphasis, Mercola’s)

To cut to the chase, Mercola advises his readers to avoid Teflon-coated cookware because it “contains” PFOA – perflurooctanoic acid, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deems a “likely carcinogen.”

There then follows a long list of reasons why cooking with Teflon-coated products “could be endangering your family and pets.”

What Mercola misses in his rush to indict Teflon, and – funnily enough – sell you his own line of cookware – is that it is impossible to ingest PFOA from Teflon. PFOA is used to bond the Teflon coating to a metal surface, but in the process, which involves extremely high temperatures, virtually all of the PFOA is incinerated. The remainder is not accessible under any normal cooking method – unless you actually ate the pan along with whatever you cooked in it (in which case, PFOA would be the least of your problems).

All of which is why the Food and Drug Administration and the EPA have said that consumers are just not at risk from using Teflon-coated cookware.

Of course, if you’ve just invested a stack of money in your own range of cookware, the salient fact that you can’t ingest PFOA from a Teflon coating is a tad inconvenient to your “save your kids and pets” sales pitch.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with Dr. Mercola’s range of enamel-coated cast iron pots and pans, indeed, they appear to be considerably cheaper than similar items from renowned cookware maker Le Creuset. Whether they are as well made is, perhaps, a matter for Consumer Affairs.

For more on Dr. Mercola, read –

Vancouver Sun Recommends Crank Website for Health Info
Wellness doc alarmed over, well – just about everything, including drugs to treat AIDS and the risk of dying young from winning the lottery.