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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Fumes from seasoning a cast iron pan or high heat cooking causes cancer even in low amounts. If you want to be safe cook things at low temperature.

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/pollutants-and-contaminants/poly...

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All cooking can cause cancer regardless of the method used.

"Total concentrations were 1.9-5.3 times higher during cooking than in the background air but, for some compounds, differences of tens or hundreds of times were registered. PM10 from grilled pork was found to contribute to non-negligible cancer risks and to be very toxic, while samples from other dishes were categorised as toxic."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33581534/

From your link, a specific PAH called benzopyrene _may_ cause cancer in low amounts. It's a pretty extraordinary claim to say that we should be concerned about carcinogens from cooking with cast iron, which has been used long before our current high rates of cancer. I could see that being an argument against certain oils, but contrast that with the corresponding increase in cancer rates after the proliferation of teflon and PFAS in cookware/durable goods/clothing/lubcrication.

To further your point, there is shockingly little education to the general public about cooking oil smoke points. I've cooked more or less exclusively with grapeseed or safflower oil since learning about it, but so many people use low smoke point oils (olive oil mostly, thanks health craze) for high-temp purposes and there's nothing to indicate to them that there is a problem

We ripped out home ec in US public schools long ago to focus on things that were standardize-tested.

This can be exaggerated though. Obviously you don't want to deep fry things in olive oil, but some people say ridiculous things like "olive oil should only be used as a condiment and not as a cooking oil" ignoring that people in the Mediterranean, following a diet that seems to be one of (if not the) heathiest diets on the planet, routinely cook with it.

I think your point is valid, but also keep in mind that we just generally live longer than all our ancestors did, and they did a bunch of things we now consider not very good (e.g. working fields without sunscreen) because they generally didn't live long enough to develop cancer at the rates we are seeing with our current life expectancies.

> long before our current high rates of cancer

Be careful there. It's difficult to know historical base cancer rates, given recent advances in cancer detection. It's likely lots of cancer deaths in the elderly were simply chalked up to old age.

Also, every time DNA is copied, you roll the dice with cancer. Live long enough and you'll eventually get cancer. As people live longer, one expects cancer rates to increase, all else being equal. (Yes, there have been recent dips in life expectancy in the US, but over the time frame I'm presuming you're comparing with "our current high rates of cancer", the trend is still positive.)

Now, maybe cancer rates have increased due to increases in environmental carcinogens. However, it's not obvious to me that's the case.

Cancer rates have been dropping for the last 20 years. PAHs from cooking are known carcinogens where PFAs is possible carcinogen that in animals models, results are inclusive and observational studies the data is unreliable. What would you take the risk with? PAHs, which there are studies showing increased cancer rates in restaurant workers and show to cause cancer in animals models, or PFAs which the there is no reliable studies showing cancer risk.

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