---

Media Relations

Grab the olive oil, not the PFOA

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asked U.S. companies earlier this year to greatly reduce public exposure to prefluorooctanoic acid, a toxic chemical in Teflon. PFOA is persistent in the environment, found at very low levels in wildlife and in the blood of the general U.S. population.

According to EPA, PFOA has caused developmental and other adverse effects in laboratory animals. While EPA states that it does not have any indication that the public is being exposed to PFOA through the use of Teflon-coated or other trademarked nonstick cookware (see http://www.epa.gov/oppt/pfoa/), Diane Henshel, an associate professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said the public should be concerned.

"I would recommend that people not use Teflon products for household use. If you do, it's going to introduce something into your body that has the potential to cause adverse effects when it's not necessary," she said.

"Everything breaks down with time, and those coatings are going to be more likely to break down as they are being scraped, which happens in cooking situations, or when they are being used to heat something that could promote the breakdown of acids such as those in tomatoes, wine or alcohols. Oils also absorb Teflon and its breakdown products. Under ideal laboratory conditions, Teflon is very slow to degrade, but no one would ever call a cooking situation an ideal lab situation."

So what should you do in the kitchen?

"Olive oil is a good alternative to Teflon because it's the healthiest of the oils," said Henshel, who focuses on sublethal health effects of environmental pollutants. "Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned 'pour a little in the pan and start cooking'?"

---

---