The Healthy Non-Toxic Kitchen

Along with being the hub and heart of a home, your kitchen can be an unintentional source of daily toxins and chemicals. Here’s how to eliminate them and craft the ultimate low-toxic food prep zone.

- Linda Moon

Along with the daily meal, many people are unwittingly serving up small amounts of chemicals and heavy metals leached from cooking appliances, utensils, food containers, wrappings and water pipes. As you clean up and cook, you’re also potentially inhaling toxic vapours from stoves and cleaning products. On the upside, as masters of your own domain, you have the power to transition your kitchens into less toxic zones.

Non-toxic cookware

“An important place to start is by ditching non-stick cookware,” says Jo Immig, coordinator of the National Toxics Network in Australia. This includes non-stick woks, frypans, saucepans and baking ware. During cooking, non-stick particles can be scraped and dislodged by utensils into the food we eat, she warns.

“The term ‘non-stick’ actually covers a broad range of proprietary brand coatings with different formulations, including Teflon®,” Immig explains. Virtually all of these contain numerous chemical ingredients bad for your health. The research reported by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) shows heating Teflon at standard cooking temperatures generates highly toxic gases and particles that can kill household birds. An award-winning 2018 documentary, The Devil We Know, links perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and associated chemicals from Teflon to birth defects, kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, pre-eclampsia, and high cholesterol. A 2011 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism also implicates the chemical in early menopause.