Part of “adulting” your household means swapping your mismatched kitchen goods for complete sets (silverware, wine glasses, and pots and pans, we’re looking at you). There’s no need to do it all at once—take baby steps and start with one category at a time so you can slowly revamp your everyday cooking and entertaining essentials with cleaner and better-for-you options. We’re making the adulting shopping checklist easy for you by sharing where to buy non-toxic pots and pans.
If we’re not paying attention to the ingredients in the lotions, serums, and makeup we use on our face and body, we run the risk of toxins seeping into our skin. The same goes for cookware: if the appliances you prep your food in are filled with chemicals, those unsafe materials can trickle in to what you’re eating. No thanks. We reached out to the founder and CEO of Caraway, Jordan Nathan, to further explain why it’s best to avoid pots and pans made with certain substances, including Teflon.
“Teflon is a synthetic coating found in 90%+ of nonstick cookware. It’s a toxic material that can easily leach substances directly into your food and release fumes into the air, all in less than three minutes of being on a hot stove. With frequent exposure to the odorless and colorless emissions, using Teflon-coated cookware can potentially lead to a variety of health problems. Having personally been exposed to Teflon poisoning myself, I sought to create a completely chemical-free product that is safe to use for any type of cook,” he explains.
These potential effects are generally only a risk if the pans are heated to extremely high temperatures, or if they’ve gotten so much use that the coating is starting to deteriorate. That said, we like to keep such risks out of our kitchen altogether.
TLDR: When you’re looking for safe cookware, check for options that are free of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, commonly known as Teflon), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and other potentially toxic substances. Shop our picks for non-toxic pots and pans below:
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