Welcome back to the show. Fellow conspiracy realist. Are you currently listening to us while cooking? Are you using a non stick pan? Who? Buddy, we got some news for you.
Are you watching YouTube videos by the comedy music group the Non Stick Pans. Well, if you're not, you shouldn't. They do some really great David Bowie impressions. But no, the real thing, non stick pans and the cover up behind that chemical that leads to that very specific effect. Boy, oh boy, is it worth a podcast and more.
We have some very specific memories about nonstick pans in this episode, and we think it might line up with some of yours. We want to hear from you, so when you finish, definitely right to us. Let us know.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, and welcome to the show.
My name is Noel, and our compatriot Matt is actually on vacation, but we'll be returning soon. In the meantime, they call me Ben. We were joined with our super producer Paul Mission Control decand most importantly, you are you you are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Today is one of those the more you know kind of episodes.
It really, it really is on the surface, on the on the non stick frictionaliss surface. It may sound a little bit mundane, but we have uncovered a tale that is decades in the making and pretty disturbing. The story starts, uh in the time of the ancient Greeks. Really, if you think about it, the plan Greeks. Yes, that's correct. You back in the old days. For most of human history, anybody who cooked something struggled to make cook wear that
wasn't a huge pain in the keyster to clean. You know, it's no secret even today that certain food stuffs can be pretty messy and leave difficult stains or residue on pots or pants. Like for instance, have you ever roasted something and then realized, you know, I have to make this taste great, because I'm going to spend some time afterwards just scrubbing the heck out of this.
That's what tenfoil is for, my man. Yes, it's not only for hats.
Right there we go, that's well done.
Yeah.
Tenfoil is an excellent example of how we have evolved strategies and technologies to combat this. You know, it's not even unfortunate, it's just an inconvenient reality of cooking. I'm glad you brought up the ancient mice knee in Greeks because they were aware of this residue problem. And more than three years ago they appeared to have invented a very clever type of ceramic griddle that functioned kind of like non stick cooking surfaces.
But not through chemistry. It was through texture and craftsmanship, right, yeah, hellso, so here's the deal. These griddles that they invented had a smooth side and a side that was kind of porous, covered with these tiny holes, and they were using it to grill bread. And bread was probably placed on the side with the holes because the dough would stick if it was a completely flat surface, and they were doomed
to spend hours scrubbing away this bread residue. But if they had the little pores, then it would kind of vent a little bit and it would create a surface that the bread was less likely to stick to. Yeah.
Right, it's some pretty cool mcgiving there, and sadly it didn't really catch on the rest of the world. Was stuck spending hours and hours scrubbing away on ordinary pots, pans, and other cooking surfaces. So in your mind, conspiracy realist, go ahead and cue the image of a scullery maid scraping out the bottom of a huge soup pot.
That was me last night. That was you last night. I made some rice and rice. If you let it go a little too longer, and you let it simmer a little too longer, it becomes this like sticky, kind of crusty layer on the bottom, yeah, that you then have to soak and get rid of.
But the bottom, the rice crust tastes delicious, really huge fan of it. Better Yet, let's cut past that image of a scullery maid and go to a despairing TV infomercial host. Let's imagine let's imagine this scullery maid at the beginning of an infomercial, if they had those in the Middle Ages throwing up their hands and wailing, There's got to.
Be a better way. There has to be right.
Here are the facts. This situation began to change in nineteen thirty eight when it kept us named. Roy Plunkett invented something called polytetrafluoroethylene or ptfe PTFE is a type of thing, a genre of thing known as per and polyfluoroalcl substances or PFA's. Without going too far into the weeds on the chemistry here, pfas encompass an entire family of synthetic chemicals that have one thing in common. They
contain a carbon and fluorine atom backbone. There are hundreds of these things out there, hundreds of known PFA compounds, and they have varying functional groups. They can include other elements as well, such as oxygen, hydrogen, or sulfur. Today we call the stuff that Roy discovered teflon. Roy accidentally invented this substance, but he quickly realized at a number of unique properties. First, it had high corrosion resistance, meaning it's less likely to degrade to rust so.
On, which is important because when you're repeatedly using this cookware and you're washing it, rust is likely to develop, exactly very important that you have some kind of safeguard against it, or else you're gonna have to keep switching out your pots.
And this stuff also had the lowest coefficient of friction of any substance that had ever been manufactured before.
Now, why is this important, Ben, This is interesting to me.
Because it makes it slick, you know what I mean, things just tend not to stick to it. This this is something that we associate with cooking today, but originally it had a much different use.
Yeah. Initially it was used to strengthen seals that would be not seals like but seals like you know, seals like a jar. To tighten strengthen these seals that would be specifically exposed to uranium hexafluoride gas during the development of the A bomb in World War Two. And interestingly enough, it was considered a military secret.
So Teflon before it was called teflon, the actual substance was top secret. It was classified the US government. Uncle Sam and DuPont didn't want the rest of the world to know about this technology. DuPont actually didn't register the Teflon trademark until nineteen forty four when they began planning for commercial applications after the end of the war. They said, you know, we paid our dues helping build the Adam Baum, but that's kind of a niche market, so we probably want to diversify.
Yeah, well, that's that happens all the time with this government stuff. It starts out for a very specific use, and then they realize, okay, we can now let this out to the public and make a little cash.
Make a little scratch. Yeah, so, well, scratch is probably a poor trace of words. We're talking teflon, It's true. By nineteen fifty one, DuPont had figured out uses for teflon in large scale bread and cookie making. And we say large scale bread and cookie making, what we mean is the industrial level stuff. Yeah, you know, not mom and pop shop base, big bread, Yeah, big cookie, big
bread and big cookie exactly. But they initially avoided marketing teflon in consumer cookwear because they were concerned internally over a possible health risk. They didn't really publicize this, they just said, let's not do it yet. The credit for the teflon revolution belongs mostly to a guy named John Gilbert.
While John Gilbert was working at DuPont, he realized, hey, teflon can be used to coat the average pot and pan, And just one year later there was a French engineer who was experimenting with using teflon to coat his fishing gear because it was so frictionless that it reduced the likelihood of the gear tangling up interesting, and that's all he thought about. But his wife said, hey, that looks like it worked for fishing gear. Why don't we coat our pots and pans and the same stuff. The idea
was a success. In nineteen fifty four, they were granted a patent from the French government and they formed a company called tefol tefal in nineteen fifty six.
And so nowadays there are other types of nonstick coding, but Teflon remains the most well known. I mean, it's a household name, and it has tons of applications from coding cables to providing corrosion resistance to industrial equipment. But the still most widely known use the public is aware of is that this is the stuff that helps you keep from having to scrub your pots and pans for hours at a time.
Right right, there is one small problem. Not only can this stuff be dangerous, surprisingly so, but it turns out that the manufacturers of teflon and related substances and the ingredients of teflon knew about the dangers. They decided the profits outweighed the risk, and they covered up these dangers for at the very least decades. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy.
So, writing for The Intercept, journalists by the name of Sharon Lerner exposed DuPont's multi decade cover up of what she refers to as quote the severe harms of health associated with a chemical known as PFOA or C eight and associated compounds it as PFOS and gen X. Wow. Yeah, that's a that's a serious name.
Well, there also used to be a pretty good comic series might still be out called Generation X. Do you remember that?
I don't. Oh?
Okay, well check it out if you're a Marvel fan. For a long long time, few people in the public had ever heard of C eight. C eight is one of the essential ingredients in teflon. This stuff is everywhere. It's called a surface and because it reduces the surface tension of water. It's a slippery, very stable compound, and it was eventually used in hundreds of products. It's in
gore tex, it's another waterproof clothing. It's a coating for eyeglasses, for tennis rackets, it's a stain proof coating for carpets and furniture, firefighting foam, fast food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, bicycle lubricants, satellite components, communication cables, ski wax, even pizza boxes, wow and concerns about the safety of teflon. C eight and other things were called long chain per fluorinated chemicals first came to the public attention more than a decade ago.
But there's a long, often untold story about DuPont's involvement with C eight, and until Sharon Lerner investigated this in like a nineteen part series that you can read for free online, no one had really told this story. Over the past fifteen years, lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle against C eight and its manufacturers are people who use it in products, including DuPont and three M, which manufactures some of the substances that DuPont buys to
create teflon. This stuff culminated in a class action lawsuit that was it's about three thy five hundred personal injury claims that went to trial in September of twenty seventeen. But before we get to that, and before we get to the EPA's involvement in Uncle Sam's involvement or collusion in this sordid tail, let's look at the kind of
health effects this stuff can cause it's pretty nasty. Exposure to these long chain per fluorinated chemicals can cause things like ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, hypertension, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney answer, and more. We know these aren't just rumors.
Yeah, And how come you don't hear that in the fine print for nonstick pan commercials? Right?
You just hear don't use a metal spatula, right, right, And that's part of the reason, because you know that teflon stuff can flake off and into your body. In twenty eleven twenty twelve, after years of research, scientists published more than three dozen peer reviewed articles on these effects, and one of the most troubling parts of their findings was that the chemicals had they affected your entire body, not just a particular organ or system. Even very low
exposure could impact a person's health. And this stuff builds up in your body sort of like how remember when people concerned about eating too many specific types of fish because of mercury. Of course, right, and that's still a thing that should be concerning to people. This stuff was the same way. It could build up in your body,
and it could build up in wildlife. But this was also very old news old beans to DuPont because their scientists had studied this chemical and related chemicals for decades and decades, and they were very well informed about the dangers.
But instead of informing the public, instead of informing government agencies like the EPA, instead of informing communities living near the plants where teflon was manufactured, instead of informing their own employees, they kept the finding secret, and they perpetrated a remarkably successful cover up.
They absolutely did. Sadly, we can rate the cover up success in one absolutely frightening statistic, and it is this C eight is a man made compound. It did not exist one hundred years ago, and now it is in the blood of ninety nine point seven percent of Americans. And this is from a two thousand and seven analysis of from the CDC. C aight is present in newborns,
breast milk, and blood from umbilical cords. It's also in a wide range of wildlife, including loggerhead sea turtles, bottlenosed dolphins, harbor seals, polar bears, cariboo, walras, says, bald eagles, lions, tigers, and arctic birds. Apparently not bears.
Yeah, apparently, I'm sure, a lot of people were waiting to hear the bears, So you could say, if you wanted to be a little more optimistic about it, you could say, maybe there was something wrong with the methodology of the test, maybe the data was analyzed incorrectly, Maybe the CDC for some reason is screwing up. But we can assure you the odds of that are pretty low.
You could also be optimistic and say, well, hey, I don't eat loggerhead, sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins, harbor seals, polar bears, and so on. But this is still indicative of a widespread problem because if it's if, if it's existing, if it's found existing in those animals that are, you know, maybe not even directly part of the human food chain, you can only imagine it likely exists in animals that are part of the human food chain, or more commonly
found in it. In their defense, DuPont no longer uses C eight, But at this point, removing it from Earth's environment is impossible because remember we mentioned that it's a very chemically stable compound. As far as we know, this stuff does not break down. This means that it will be on the planet for a long time. It may even outlast humanity, So millions and millions of years in
the future. If some extraterrestrial civilization exists and for some reason visits our planet, they may not find us, but they will find traces of our time here. And one of the thing you say we'll find will be teflon in everything?
Am I going to die?
Ben?
I cook with teflon pans all the time? Well, life is a one way ride, Noel, Okay, that was a broad question. Iselon killing me softly.
It does pose significant health risk. And now that the public is more aware of this situation, this epidemic, the government has started to take action, and private litigation has also escalated. We'll tell you a little more about the current situation, as well as DuPont's internal battles after a word from our sponsor, and we're back. Eight companies are
responsible for eight contamination in the US. DuPont is far and away the leader here of these eight companies in terms of both the use of C eight and emissions of it. But seven others were found to have a role, including three M. Because three M, as you said, actually manufactured C eight or produced it and sold it to DuPont for years while they were also very likely aware
of the dangers from the very beginning. DuPont scientists approached ATE's potential dangers with a pretty high bar of rigor, and they studied it closely. Way back in nineteen fifty four, there was a DuPont employee named ra A. Dickinson who noted that he had received an inquiry regarding CH's quote possible toxicity.
Yeah. And then in nineteen sixty one, just seven years later, in house researchers already had the short answer to Dickinson's question. C eight was indeed toxic and should be quote handled with extreme care, like not slathered on household goods. Right.
By the next year, what did we say, they're sixty one by yea. By nineteen sixty two, experiments had whittled down these broad concerns into some red flags, and they found some specific conditions caused by C eight. Exposure to C eight was linked to the enlargement of rat testicles, adrenal glands, and kidneys. The company even, at least in one instance that we know of, the company even conducted
human experimentation with C eight. In nineteen sixty two, scientists asked volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C eight and they found that nice, well, at least they asked them to do it. They found that nine out of ten people in the highest dose group were noticeably significantly ill for an average of nine hours, so as much as eighteen, you know, and they have flu like symptoms that included chills, back, ache, fever,
and coughing. We don't know if they did a follow up study years later to see the rates of cancer, but we do know that this cover up then encompasses more than just teflon, because remember, Teflon is a brand name for something that is a type of PFA, and pfas are used in so many things we mentioned, the microwave popcorn, the firefighting foam, fast food wrappers, industrial processes.
They have been proven to have clear and harmful effects on human beings and wildlife, and as we record this episode, scientists, attorneys, and public interest groups are still working to figure out the sheer scale of the contamination as well as the extent of danger this poses to humans and wildlife. Like
here's an example. They DuPont used to get rid of these substances by putting them in barrels and putting rocks putting rocks in the barrels or waiting the barrels somehow and then just dropping them in the ocean or dropping them with water sources. So that means that there are.
There are areas of.
The world where the groundwater has been contaminated with this stuff. And we don't. When I say we, I don't just mean DuPont or the US or anything. I mean our species hasn't figured out how to get this stuff out.
Yeah, so even if that seems to be a kind of a common issue, doesn't that we're real good at putting stuff in, haven't quite feared how to put stuff out.
We're all Mickey Mouse at the beginning of Fantasia, remember when he figures out that excellent way to mop up when he's the source of apprentice and he starts making mops, but they make mops and then the flood begins.
You know, But never that ever occurred to me. That is a very good analogy, metaphor what have you, for the exact kind of stuff we're talking about. The kid put the magic back in the bucket, right right exactly. I actually went to a talk recently. It was a weird pairing. It was Jaden Smith interviewing al Gore about climate change, and something came up at the end where Jayden asked al Gore, like, so, what technology in the future is there to pull these emissions out of the atmosphere.
And the fact of the matter is that there's something that sort of exists, but it requires so much energy to do it that it makes it not really cost effective or just practical at all. So, I mean, I guess people are thinking about this kind of stuff, but it's like it usually is so much more of a of a to do than just to maybe do a better job of not putting the stuff in there in the first.
Place, right, right, And this goes beyond, this goes beyond politics. This is just a health concern. And I know some of us in the audience may may object to the alarmism that gets so commonly, you know, spread about in the public sphere when we talk about these global or macro level human threats. But the reality of the situation now, at least just my opinion, the reality is the situation now is the following. The Earth does not need humanity. Life on Earth in some form will likely continue for
a long long time. Human life on Earth is not a sure thing. And you know, it's not as if Earth itself really has an opinion or cares. We are just one in a long line of dominant species that have come and gone on this little rock orbiting the Sun, and the third one right right. And this means that the most significant race or challenge for the human species now is going to be technological innovation versus increasingly inhospitable natural environments.
So are we going.
To survive as a species, you know, off planet living in domes? There are a lot of optimistic futurists who would say yes, Like that Polyshor movie Biodome, Biodome, there wasn't a Baldwin into that.
There was definitely a Baldin in that.
I you know, that's one of those films that I think I enjoyed when I was a kid, and I think I'm just gonna leave it there. I don't know if I don't know if I should rewatch it.
I think not.
I don't know if it's aged well, I doubt that it has. What was the other one with the caveman, Prisino Man, Brenda and Frasier. We's in the JITs, that's right. I don't know if I'll watch that one.
No, you shouldn't. You know what I did the other night I watched Phantom Menace again for the first time in a long time. That movie is problematic on many levels. Let me tell you, is that what we chargearbeings That one that is a racial caricature, but there's a bunch of other ones. There's like the Trade Federation. Guys. We're kind of like these very cliche, almost like Asian caricatures, and there's just tons of them. Not to mention the right is quite hackneyed.
It's yeah, it's it's strange. I read this has nothing to do with anything, certainly not the fate of the planet.
But I've had a minute kind of had to do with the fate of the planet a planet.
Yeah.
But but.
There is a very interesting fan theory that initially I dismissed, and it argues that in the initial stages of planning for Phantom Menace and the movies at that would come after, George R. Binks was supposed to be like a low key sith lord and then later exposed as a sith lord.
Oh wow, it's.
Again, it's a fan theory. I haven't seen anything that made that counted as smoking gun level evidence.
This is evil sith power just to like annoy you to death.
Well, it's interesting because he shows remarkable agility in some areas. I don't you'll have you'll have to read. I'm sure it's available on cracked or one of the other one of the other popular fan theory analysis sites. But back
to the back to the Teflon menace. For lack of a better term, in February of this year of twenty eighteen, three MS settled a lawsuit with Minnesota for eight hundred and fifty million dollars in essence admitting, according to Shannon Lerner, that they acted with a deliberate disregard for the high risk of injury to the citizens and wildlife of Minnesota. And they they went for this settlement eight hundred and
fifty million dollars. It's not going to put them in the poorhouse, but it is a significant chunk of change.
They went for the settlement because the Minnesota Attorney General's office released a huge set of documents, internal studies by scientists at THREEM, memos, emails, and research reports that detailed what THREEM knew about the harmful potential of these chemicals right now, right now, there's probably already at least according to the CDC, some kind of PFA in your system, in your body as you hear this, unless what point
three percent of the population. And one of the one of the most widely acknowledged possible dangers of teflon, and this was acknowledged publicly way before the lawsuits began, is that if you have a teflon pan and you overheat it to about six hundred degrees fahrenheit, it will it could release toxic gases. But again, that didn't seem like too much of a concern because very few people cook stuff at six hundred degrees That's true. Here's a question
for you to leave us with. What's the alternative is? You know, I have some non nonstick pans.
They are a bit of a pain in the butt when you cook certain things on them. But typically when you're watching like cooking shows and like chefs and stuff and high level cooks, they're not really using nonstick pans all the time. They're using like copper pans and like nicer stainless steel pans, right or le Crouse exactly. So what's the what's the difference and what and is it? Is it literally just a matter of well you might have to pre soak them a little longer, take better care of them. Yeah.
There are some manufacturers of nonstick pans that are advertised as non toxic. So one example would be something like Willing, which is just the word Willing with a Z.
They're a German.
Company that made that made their name I believe in knives, but they use a lot of They also manufacture a lot of ceramic nonstick cookware. And then there's a thing called green Pan. They use something called thermalon. It's a patented ceramic nonstick layer that's made out of sand. Essentially, it doesn't have lead or cadmium or pfas or PFOA
or all the other stuff. And the problem with that stuff is it's heat resistant up to four hund and fifty degrees cells, meaning that it won't release toxic fumes unless you heat it past that. You can find other alternatives, several of them are higher end, so they're going to be more of an investment. But for their part, DuPont has instituted some other substances to replace C eight because, as we said, they no longer use that and the
EPA has been involved. It says it remains committed to evaluating PFOA and PFOS under the regulatory determination process using the best available science. As part of their evaluation, they are going to be reviewing all newly available scientific info, including the report by the ATSDR, the Agency for Toxic
Substances and Disease Registry. They also said they are taking steps to accelerate quote the determination process before for the existing statutory deadline, which is twenty twenty one, So in a few years this stuff will change. But maybe the last thing we should end on here is as of November twenty eighteen, the EPA also found that the chemicals manufacturers used to replace these original toxic substances like C eight, were themselves toxic, so they replaced it with a different
with a different dangerous chemical. That's where we're at now.
Oh cool, slightly lesser of the two evils.
It's I believe it's gen x is one of the ones that they said was still dangerous, but hopefully yeah, is it is slightly lesser. And look, we're we're not saying that if you use a nonstick pan you are going to die. We're saying that exposure to the substances used to make teflon are are quite dangerous and a lot of the a lot of the lawsuits came about from former DuPont employees or employee of the manufacturers of these substances, or people living near the plants or disposal sites.
So it's not Cooking with a non stick pan is not the same thing as just huffing straight pfoas.
Oh good, So there's that right, cool. Yeah, that's comforting.
And if you would like to read the full series on the intercept, I want to tell you that it is excellent. It is very thorough. It's quite long. It's a long greed, but it's worth your time if you would like to learn more about how this successful cover up, this successful corporate conspiracy to disguise the health risk of these substances actually evolved and developed over time, as well as where it is at currently. Thank you so much
for checking out our show. Let us know what you think is this is this situation wherein a large company just wasn't aware of the science. Is this being exaggerated by alarmist interest groups or is there a real and genuine threat and if so, why or why not you can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter. We'd especially like to recommend Here's where it gets crazy, our community Facebook page where you can hang out with your fellow conspiracy realist and you know, see some funny memes.
Yeah, we've been known to lurk. We have, indeed, Yes, so do all this.
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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