Mythbusting Cookware Materials
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In Wednesday’s newsletter, we asked you what kind of cookware you mostly use, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 45% said stainless steel
- About 21% said cast iron
- About 15% said non-stick (e.g. Teflon)
- About 9% said enamel
- About 6% said aluminum
- And 1 person selected “something else”, but then commented to the contrary, writing “I use all of the above”
So, what does the science say about these options?
Stainless steel cookware is safe: True or False?
True! Assuming good quality and normal use, anyway. There really isn’t a lot to say about this, because it’s very unexciting. So long as it is what it is labelled as: there’s nothing coating it, nothing comes out of it unless you go to extremes*, and it’s easy to clean.
*If you cook for long durations at very high temperatures, it can leach nickel and chromium into food. What this means in practical terms: if you are using stainless steel to do deep-frying, then maybe stop that, and also consider going easy on deep-frying in general anyway, because obviously deep-frying is unhealthy for other reasons.
Per normal use, however: pretty much the only way (good quality) stainless steel cookware will harm you is if you touch it while it’s hot, or if it falls off a shelf onto your head.
That said, do watch out for cheap stainless steel cookware that can contain a lot of impurities, including heavy metals. Since you probably don’t have a mass spectrometer and/or chemistry lab at home to check for those impurities, your best guard here is simply to buy from a reputable brand with credible certifications.
Ceramic cookware is safe: True or False?
True… Most of the time! Ceramic pans usually have metal parts and a ceramic cooking surface coated with a very thin layer of silicon. Those metal parts will be as safe as the metals used, so if that’s stainless steel, you’re just as safe as the above. As for the silicon, it is famously inert and body-safe (which is why it’s used in body implants).
However: ceramic cookware that doesn’t have an obvious metal part and is marketed as being pure ceramic, will generally be sealed with some kind of glaze that can leach heavy metals contaminants into the food; here’s an example:
Lead toxicity from glazed ceramic cookware
Copper cookware is safe: True or False?
False! This is one we forgot to mention in the poll, as one doesn’t see a lot of it nowadays. The copper from copper pans can leach into food. Now, of course copper is an important mineral that we must get from our diet, but the amount of copper that that can leach into food from copper pans is far too much, and can induce copper toxicity.
In addition, copper cookware has been found to be, on average, highly contaminated with lead:
Non-stick cookware contaminates the food with microplastics: True or False?
True! If we were to discuss all the common non-stick contaminants here, this email would no longer fit (there’s a size limit before it gets clipped by most email services).
Suffice it to say: the non-stick coating, polytetrafluoroethylene, is itself a PFAS, that is to say, part of the category of chemicals considered environmental pollutants, and associated with a long list of health issues in humans (wherein the level of PFAS in our bloodstream is associated with higher incidence of many illnesses):
You may have noticed, of course, that the “non-stick” coating doesn’t stick very well to the pan, either, and will tend to come off over time, even if used carefully.
Also, any kind of wet cooking (e.g. saucepans, skillets, rice cooker inserts) will leach PFAS into the food. In contrast, a non-stick baking tray lined with baking paper (thus: a barrier between the tray and your food) is really not such an issue.
We wrote about PFAS before, so if you’d like a more readable pop-science article than the scientific paper above, then check out:
PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High
Aluminum cookware contaminates the food with aluminum: True or False?
True! But not usually in sufficient quantities to induce aluminum toxicity, unless you are aluminum pans Georg who eats half a gram of aluminum per day, who is a statistical outlier and should not be counted.
That’s a silly example, but an actual number; the dose required for aluminum toxicity in blood is 100mg/L, and you have about 5 liters of blood.
Unless you are on kidney dialysis (because 95% of aluminum is excreted by the kidneys, and kidney dialysis solution can itself contain aluminum), you will excrete aluminum a lot faster than you can possibly absorb it from cookware. On the other hand, you can get too much of it from it being a permitted additive in foods and medications, for example if you are taking antacids they often have a lot of aluminum oxide in them—but that is outside the scope of today’s article.
However, aluminum may not be the real problem in aluminum pans:
❝In addition, aluminum (3.2 ± 0.25 to 4.64 ± 0.20 g/kg) and copper cookware (2.90 ± 0.12 g/kg) were highly contaminated with lead.
The time and pH-dependent study revealed that leaching of metals (Al, Pb, Ni, Cr, Cd, Cu, and Fe, etc.) into food was predominantly from anodized and non-anodized aluminum cookware.
More metal leaching was observed from new aluminum cookware compared to old. Acidic food was found to cause more metals to leach during cooking.❞
~ the same paper we cited when talking about copper
Cast iron cookware contaminates the food with iron: True or False?
True, but unlike with the other metals discussed, this is purely a positive, and indeed, it’s even recommended as a good way to fortify one’s diet with iron:
The only notable counterpoint we could find for this is if you have hemochromatosis, a disorder in which the body is too good at absorbing iron and holding onto it.
Thinking of getting some new cookware?
Here are some example products of high-quality safe materials on Amazon, but of course feel free to shop around:
Stainless Steel | Ceramic* | Cast Iron
*it says “non-stick” in the description, but don’t worry, it’s ceramic, not Teflon etc, and is safe
Bonus: rice cooker with stainless steel inner pot
Take care!
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How To Avoid Slipping Into (Bad) Old Habits
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Treating Bad Habits Like Addictions
How often have you started a healthy new habit (including if it’s a “quit this previous thing” new habit), only to find that you slip back into your old ways?
We’ve written plenty on habit-forming before, so here’s a quick recap before we continue:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
…and even how to give them a boost:
How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!
But how to avoid the relapses that are most likely to snowball?
Borrowing from the psychology of addiction recovery
It’s well known that someone recovering from substance addiction should not have even a small amount of the thing they were addicted to. Not one sip of champagne at a wedding, not one drag of a cigarette, and so forth.
This can go for other bad habits too; make one exception, and suddenly you have a whole string of “exceptions”, and before you know it, it’s not the exception anymore; it’s the new rule—again.
Three things that can help guard against this are:
- Absolutely refuse to romanticize the bad habit. Do not fall for its marketing! And yes, everything has marketing even if not advertising; for example, consider the Platonic ideal of a junk-food-eating couch-potato who is humble, unassuming, agreeable, the almost-holy idea of homely comfort, and why shouldn’t we be comfortable after all, haven’t we earned our chosen hedonism, and so on. It’s seductive, and we need to make the choice to not be seduced by it. In this case for example, yes pleasure is great, but being sick tired and destroying our bodies is not, in fact, pleasurable in the long run. Which brings us to…
- Absolutely refuse to forget why you dropped that behavior in the first place. Remember what it did to you, remember you at your worst. Remember what you feared might become of you if you continued like that. This is something where journaling helps, by the way; remembering our low points helps us to avoid finding ourselves in the same situation again.
- Absolutely refuse to let your guard down due to an overabundance of self-confidence in your future self. We all can easily feel that tomorrow is a mystical land in which all productivity is stored, and also where we are strong, energized, iron-willed, and totally able to avoid making the very mistakes that we are right now in the process of making. Instead, be that strong person now, for the benefit of tomorrow’s you. Because after all, if it’s going to be easy tomorrow, it’s easy now, right?
The above is a very simple, hopefully practical, set of rules to follow. If you like hard science more though, Yale’s Dr. Steven Melemis offers five rules (aimed more directly at addiction recovery, so this may be a big “heavy guns” for some milder habits):
- change your life
- be completely honest
- ask for help
- practice self-care
- don’t bend the rules
You can read his full paper and the studies it’s based on, here:
Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery
“What if I already screwed up?”
Draw a line under it, now, and move forwards in the direction you actually want to go.
Here’s a good article, that saves us taking up more space here; it’s very well-written so we do recommend it:
The Abstinence Violation Effect and Overcoming It
this article gives specific, practical advices, including CBT tools to use
Take care!
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The Liver Cure – by Dr. Russell Blaylock
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We’ve written before about How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver, but there’s a lot more that can be said in a book that we couldn’t fit into our article.
In this book, Dr. Blaylock looks at the causes and symptoms of liver disease, the mechanisms behind such, and how we can adjust our dietary habits (and other things) to do better for ourselves.
While the book’s primary focus is on diet, he does also look at medications (especially: those that hinder liver health, which are many, including simple/common stuff like Tylenol and similar), and the effects of different lifestyle choices, including ones that aren’t diet-related.
Because most people’s knowledge of liver disease starts and ends at “don’t drink yourself to death”, this book is an important tome of knowledge for actually keeping this critical organ in good order—especially since symptoms of liver disease can initially be subtle, and slow to show, often escaping notice until it’s already far, far worse than it could have been.
Many people find out by experiencing liver failure.
The writing style is… A little repetitive for this reviewer’s preference, but it does make sure that you won’t miss things. Also, when it comes to supplements, he repeatedly recommends a particular company, and it’s not clear whether he has a financial interest there. But the actual medical information is good and important and comprehensive.
Bottom line: if you’d like to keep your liver in good health, this is a book that will help you to do just that.
Click here to check out The Liver Cure, and keep yours working well!
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Make Your Coffee Heart-Healthier!
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Health-Hack Your Coffee
We have previously written about the general health considerations (benefits and potential problems) of coffee:
The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
Today, we will broadly assume that you are drinking coffee (in general, not necessarily right now, though if you are, same!) and would like to continue to do so. We also assume you’d like to do so as healthily as possible.
Not all coffees are created equal
If you order a coffee in France or Italy without specifying what kind, the coffee you receive will be short, dark,
and handsomeand without sugar. Healthwise, this is not a bad starting point. However…- It will usually be espresso
- Or it may be what in N. America is called a French press (in Europe it’s just called a cafetière)
Both of these kinds of coffee mean that cafestol, a compound found in the oily part of coffee and which is known to raise LDL (“bad” cholesterol”), stays in the drink.
Read: Cafestol and Kahweol: A Review on Their Bioactivities and Pharmacological Properties
Also: Cafestol extraction yield from different coffee brew mechanisms
If you’re reading that second one and wondering what a mocha pot or a Turkish coffee is, they are these things:
- Mocha pot: a stovetop device used for making espresso without an espresso machine
- Turkish coffee pot: also a stovetop device; this thing makes some of the strongest coffee you have ever encountered. Turks usually add sugar (this writer doesn’t; but my taste in coffee been described as “coffee like a punch in the face”)
So, wonderful as they are for those of us who love strong coffee, they also produce the highest in-drink levels of cafestol. If you’d like to cut the cafestol (for example, if you are keeping an eye on your LDL), we recommend…
The humble filter coffee
Whether by your favorite filter coffee machine or a pour-over low-tech coffee setup of the kind you could use even without an electricity supply, the filter keeps more than just the coffee grinds out; it keeps the cafestol out too; most of it, anyway, depending on what kind of filter you use, and the grind of the coffee:
Physical characteristics of the paper filter and low cafestol content filter coffee brews
What about instant coffee?
It has very little cafestol in it. It’s up to you whether that’s sufficient reason to choose it over any other form of coffee (this coffee-lover could never)
Want to make any coffee healthier?
This one isn’t about the cafestol, but…
If you take l-theanine (see here for our previous main feature about l-theanine), the l-theanine acts as a moderator and modulator of the caffeine, amongst other benefits:
The Cognitive-Enhancing Outcomes of Caffeine and L-theanine: A Systematic Review
As to where to get that, we don’t sell it, but here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Quinoa vs Couscous – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing quinoa to couscous, we picked the quinoa.
Why?
Firstly, quinoa is the least processed by far. Couscous, even if wholewheat, has by necessity been processed to make what is more or less the same general “stuff” as pasta. Now, the degree to which something has or has not been processed is a common indicator of healthiness, but not necessarily declarative. There are some processed foods that are healthy (e.g. many fermented products) and there are some unprocessed plant or animal products that can kill you (e.g. red meat’s health risks, or the wrong mushrooms). But in this case—quinoa vs couscous—it’s all borne out pretty much as expected.
For the purposes of the following comparisons, we’ll be looking at uncooked/dry weights.
In terms of macros, quinoa has a little more protein, slightly lower carbs, and several times the fiber. The amino acids making up quinoa’s protein are also much more varied.
In the category of vitamins, quinoa has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, and B9, while couscous boasts a little more of vitamins B3 and B5. Given the respective margins of difference, as well as the total vitamins contained, this category is an easy win for quinoa.
When it comes to minerals, this one’s not even more clear. Quinoa has a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Couscous, meanwhile has more of just one mineral: sodium. So, maybe not one you want more of.
All in all, today’s is an easy pick: quinoa!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Carbohydrate Mythbusting: Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?
- What’s The Real Deal With The Paleo Diet?
- Gluten Mythbusting: What’s The Truth? ← we didn’t mention it above, but couscous is by default gluten-free, and couscous, being made of wheat, is by default not gluten-free, which may be another reason for some to choose quinoa
Take care!
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Butter vs Ghee – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing butter to ghee, we picked the butter.
Why?
Assuming a comparable source for each—e.g. butter from grass-fed cows, or ghee made from butter from grass-fed cows—both have a mostly comparable nutritional profile.
Note: the above is not a safe assumption to make in the US, unless you’re paying attention. Grass-fed cows are not the norm in the US, so it’s something that has to be checked for. On the other hand, ghee is usually imported, and grass-fed cows are the norm in most of the rest of the world, including the countries that export ghee the most. So if “buying blind”, ghee will be the safer bet. However, checking labels can overcome this.
Many of the Internet-popular health claims for ghee are exaggerated. For example, yes it contains butyrate… But at 1% or less. You’d be better off getting your butyrate from fibrous fruit and vegetables. Yes it contains medium-chain triglycerides (that’s also good), but in trace amounts. It even has conjugated linoleic acid, but you guessed it, the dose is insignificant.
Meanwhile, both butter and ghee contain heart-unhealthy animal-based saturated fats (which are usually worse for the health than some, but not all, of their plant-based equivalents). However…
- A tablespoon of butter contains about 7 grams of saturated fat
- A tablespoon of ghee contains about 9 grams of saturated fat
So, in this case, “ghee is basically butter, but purer” becomes a bad thing (and the deciding factor between the two).
There is one reason to choose butter over ghee, but it’s not health-related—it simply has a higher smoke point, as is often the case for fats that have been more processed compared to fats that have been less processed.
In short: either can be used in moderation, but even 2 tbsp of butter are taking an average person (because it depends on your metabolism, so we’ll say average) to the daily limit for saturated fats already, so we recommend to go easy even on that.
Want to know more?
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Is there anything good about menopause? Yep, here are 4 things to look forward to
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Menopause is having a bit of a moment, with less stigma and more awareness about the changes it can bring.
A recent senate inquiry recommended public education about perimenopause and menopause, more affordable treatments and flexible work arrangements.
But like many things in life the experiences of menopause are on a continuum. While some women find it challenging and require support, others experience some physical and emotional benefits. These are rarely reported – but we can learn from the research available and, importantly, from people’s lived experiences.
Here are four changes to look forward to once you reach menopause.
Insta_Photos/Shutterstock 1. No more periods or related issues
Menopause is considered “complete” 12 months after the final period of a woman (or person assigned female at birth) who previously menstruated.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the benefit at the top of the list is no more periods (unless you are taking hormone therapy and still have your womb). This can be particularly beneficial for women who have had to manage erratic, unpredictable and heavy bleeding.
At last, you don’t need to keep sanitary protection in every bag “just in case”. No more planning where the bathroom is or having to take extra clothes. And you’ll save money by not purchasing sanitary products.
There is also good news for women who have had heavy bleeding due to uterine fibroids – common benign gynaecological tumours that affect up to 80% of women. The evidence suggests hormonal changes (for women not taking hormone therapy) can lead to a reduction in the size of fibroids and relieve symptoms.
Women who suffer from menstrual migraine may experience an improvement in migraines post-menopause as their hormonal fluctuations begin to settle – but the timeframe for this remains unclear.
For some women, no more periods also means more participation in social activities from which they may have been excluded due to periods. For example, religious activities or food preparation in some cultures.
2. Getting your body and your groove back
Throughout their reproductive lives, women in heterosexual relationships are usually the ones expected to be proactive about preventing pregnancy.
Some post-menopausal women describe a re-emergence of their sexuality and a sense of sexual freedom that they had not previously experienced (despite contraceptive availability) as there is no longer a risk of pregnancy.
A participant in my research into women’s experiences of menopause described the joy of no longer being child-bearing age:
I’ve got a body back for me, you know, coz I can’t get pregnant, not that I haven’t enjoyed having [children] and things like that and it was a decision to get pregnant but I feel like, ooh my body isn’t for anybody now but me, people, you know?
For women who have chosen to be child-free there may also be a sense of freedom from social expectations. People will likely stop asking them when they are planning to have children.
3. A new chapter and a time to focus on yourself
Another participant described menopause as an unexpected “acceleration point” for change.
Women told us they were more accepting of themselves and their needs rather than being focused on the needs of other people. Researchers have previously tracked this shift from “living for others” to “a life of one’s own”.
Some women find the strength of emotions at this time a challenge, whereas others find their potency can facilitate liberation – enabling them to speak their minds or be more assertive than at any other time in their lives.
4. Increased self-confidence
A new sense of liberation can fuel increased self-confidence at menopause. This has been reported in studies based on in-depth interviews with women.
Confidence boosts can coincide with changes in career and sometimes in relationships as priorities and self-advocacy transform.
Life on the other side
It can be hard to think about what is good about menopause, particularly if you are having challenges during perimenopause – but these can get better with time.
In cultures where women are valued as they become older, women describe themselves as positively contributing to the community. They find they gain power and respect as they age.
We need to work towards more positive societal attitudes on this front. Our bodies change across the lifespan and are remarkable at every stage, including menopause.
Yvonne Middlewick, Nurse, Lecturer & Director of Post-graduate Studies in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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