Consuming healthy foods and preparing most of your meals at home is a big part of creating overall well-being. This approach allows you to be in control of the ingredients, quality, and method of preparation, all of which play a big role in feeding your body properly and improving your life expectancy.
However, using high-quality ingredients doesn’t matter if you cook in low-quality pots or bad non-stick pans. All your efforts will fall short due to the strong exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals, and long-term exposure can cause serious health conditions like heart disease, cancer, and cognitive damage.
Therefore, choosing your cookware is equally important as choosing the right ingredients.
Even though we can’t say which cookware is the safest to use, it’s always better to use those without excessive coatings or chemical interference. Here’s how to help reduce your toxic load from cookware:
Throw Away Your Non-Stick Pans
Ditch your non-stick skillet and Teflon omelet pan no matter how convenient they are. Once they are well heated, Teflon pots and pans release toxic chemical particles that fly through your kitchen and enter into everyone nearby, causing flu-like symptoms in people and even death in pet birds.
What’s more, the coating of this convenient non-stick cookware contains harmful chemicals associated with thyroid, fertility, cholesterol problems, and even cancer. We don’t think you need another reason to throw them out of your kitchen.
Purge the Plastic
Never heat or store your food in plastic food containers. They might be the most convenient food containers, but also the most harmful, especially when heated in the microwave. They contain high amounts of hormone-disrupting chemicals which leach into food, “seasoning” your meal with numerous harmful toxins. Also, plastics are not environment-friendly, which means it pollutes the earth, ocean, and sea plant and animals. Therefore, the less you use this type of cookware, the better for your overall health and the environment.
Use Glass Containers
Glass is not only great for baking, but it’s also good for carrying food to the office, storage in the fridge or freezer, and even heating soups in the microwave. Besides being convenient and versatile, glass is safe as it doesn’t release toxins into the food. You can also use glass mixing bowls for chopping and whisking. Glass is easy to clean, inexpensive, recyclable, and environment-friendly.
Consider Cast Iron Cookware
People have used this type of cookware for generations. A durable and moderately priced, well-seasoned pan or skillet is similar to non-stick cookware, providing heat to the food you put it in.
What’s more, cast iron cookware is quite a multi-tasker – you can use it in the oven as well as on the stovetop. We must mention that cast iron might release tiny amounts of iron into food. But, there are a lot of people who actually benefit from some extra iron. If you’re iron-sensitive, choose cast iron cookware in different colors, or even better, use porcelain-enameled cast iron cookware which needs a little bit more TLC to prevent rust.
What about Stainless Steel?
Being relatively easy to clean and resistant to corrosion, stainless steel might be your favorite cookware. Always choose a stainless steel piece with more corrosion resistance and higher quality, and these are pieces marked 18/10; 18/8; 300 series’ or ‘304 grade’. Stainless steel pieces with more top quality are made of more metals which are resistant to corrosion and leaching.
If you have chemical sensitivities or you just want to reduce the exposure to the metals in stainless steel, don’t buy an entire set but use one pan or pot sparingly. A good alternative to stainless steel cookware is the more expensive titanium cookware.
Via Camille Styles | Wold of Pans