Any health issues with food burnt in non-stick pan?

I’ve been frying a lot of stuff in this pan - not sure if it’s Teflon or some other chemical, doesn’t seem to indicate.

Anyway, I thought I’d read once that there was a health risk in overcooking/burning things on non-stick pans - I can’t remember if it had something to do with the burnt food burning into the surface and taking some of the surface molecules with it, or what.

Anyway, I sometimes like to burn the cheese a bit until it’s crispy, but then I don’t want to subject myself to any sort of health issues relating to it - so does that sort of thing matter? Can you do anything with a non-stick pan (other than overheating it) that’s going to present health issues?

I have no idea except that I’d be burned up at spending that much for a pan.

The risk with burning foods means literally burning them to the point where you get char/charcoal. You’ll know you’re there because you will see black on the food.

If you’re just talking about crispy cheese, you’re still several steps away from anything I’d call burned.

Teflon can break down when overheated; inhaling the fumes can cause polymer fume fever (not life threatening unless you are a bird but you get pretty sick).

However, it sounds like you are simply burning food without actually burning the non-stick coating (unless it is now peeling off*, and not from long use); burned food is still unhealthy, being implicated in cancer risk. Even unburnt food, like potatoes and other starches cooked at temperatures higher than 250F, can form harmful substances.

*There is no concern about ingesting bits of Teflon, which is so inert that it is used for body implants, although it could be contaminated with another chemical if it wasn’t made properly.

No. Do you think the manufacturer would overlook exhaustive testing for just this kind of destroy-the-business lawsuit possibility? It’s likely you could scrape off the lining with a chisel and eat a few grams of it without the slightest effect, other than some psychosomatic nausea and some odd black specks in your poop a day later. You’re basically eating plastic, and plastics are generally pretty inert.

Chemical harm to you comes overwhelming from small molecules, or even single atoms, because these can…

(1) Run the gauntlet of your digestive system, which is a pretty robust chemical environment. Your stomach grinds things up with a healthy dose of strong acid – you know it’s strong because it burns like heck when any of it gets up into your tender esophagus through acid reflux. Your intestines then further do a number on any organic molecules with a variety of effective enzymes that chop up proteins, fats and starches into their harmless components. (The famous example being that you can, within limits, eat rattlesnake poison without harm, because your digestive system shreds the poison molecule into harmless bits.) Small molecules, on the other hand, are immune to digestive enzymes – there are no bonds to break – and can much more readily stand low pH.

(2) Slip through the gateways guarding entrance to your circulatory system, e.g. get through the lining of your intestine, stomach, or mouth and enter your bloodstream.

(3) Slip from bloodstream into your cells, and

(4) Chemically react with a variety of molecules inside your cells, thereby disrupting their function and possibly causing cell death.

So as a broad rule, you should allow your fear of chemicals to be inversely proportional to their molecular weight. Things like CO, HCN, NaCN, Cl2 – extremely deadly. Bigger things like bigger proteins, foodstuffs, whether burnt or old or partially digested or whatever, are far less likely to be a problem, except in the weird special case of designed poisons, like venoms and plant defense agents.

A still bigger sensible worry are heavy metals, like lead or mercury. Here you have single atoms which can, alas, catalyze a very wide variety of noxious and potentially deadly chemical reactions once they get into your cells, and which, of course, are entirely immune to any digestive efforts. Notice also that I said catalyze – the metals are not even consumed by such reactions, and can go on doing the chemical damage essentially forever. Very tiny doses of heavy metals can have evil chronic effects. You definitely want to avoid all contact with heavy metals in your food or water. So wash your hands after you do some soldering, and if your water comes from a well, have it tested every now and then.

One reason people are concerned about burning food, by the way, is in this same vein. Cooking is chemistry, of course, a form of prelminary and very crude physical (breaking up the big structures) and chemical (oxidizing the big molecules) digestion. All very fine, and makes the food tastier and easier to digest.

But if you burn the food you are doing the chemical digestion bit a lot further – you are making unusually small molecules out of the large molecules in the food, and keep in mind what I said above about the smaller the molecule the potentially bigger the problem.

Your food is largely made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. When you burn it to a crisp, the H and O tend to be driven off as water, the N to some extent as N2, and you’re mostly left with carbon – charcoal. Pure carbon, i.e. graphite, is harmless, but along the way to carbon you can form lots of interesting small hydrocarbons, some with significant nitrogen-containing groups in them, and some of these can be quite chemically reactive in evil ways. The flat rings of aromatic carbon compounds, for example, are particularly good at sliding in between the rungs of DNA and mutating it, which is why many of these molecules, like benzene, anthracene and friends are powerful mutagens and in some cases carcinogens. Having a little nitrogen in there tends to enhance its reactivity, too.

Essentially, when you burn your food you make small quantities of the same stuff that a fossil-fuel power plant makes, and sends up the stack, or your car makes and sends out the tailpipe. Some of these are, indeed, not good for you. Of course, you make exceedingly small quanities of them at one time, so unless you really go to town all the time, it’s not likely to be a big worry.

Still, if you’re the kind of person who freaks out about a big coal plant ten miles up the road, you might not want to burn your cheese very often.

Er… wtf? $30 isn’t much at all for a pan. $10 is about as cheap as you can find, and it’ll be thin enough that it won’t heat evenly.

The pans warn you not to go above 400F, which is 8 out of 10 on a GE electric stove dial.
READ the label.
Burning Teflon can be toxic. Not just the solids, but the gases released.

Wiki Teflon sez:

Safety

The pyrolysis of PTFE is detectable at 200 °C (392 °F), and it evolves several fluorocarbon gases[18] and a sublimate. Animal studies indicate that it is unlikely that these products would be generated in amounts significant to health at temperatures below 250 °C (482 °F),[19] although birds are proven to be much more sensitive to these decomposition products.[18][20]

While PTFE is stable and nontoxic, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).[21] These degradation by-products can be lethal to birds, and can cause flu-like symptoms in humans.[21]

Meat is usually fried between 200 and 230 °C (392 and 446 °F), and most oils will start to smoke before a temperature of 260 °C is reached, but there are at least two cooking oils (refined safflower oil and avocado oil) that have a higher smoke point than 260 °C. Empty cookware can also exceed this temperature upon heating.