Dear Subscriber,
I am frequently asked about the safety of cookware.
Some years ago, we had lady named Isis Israel come to our home for a Salad Master “party”. Friends came and Isis made a delicious meal. We asked her about safety of the special steel used for Salad Master’s pots. She promised it was safe and very low in heavy metals. We bought some.
I decided to up the ante. I offered to do some heavy metal testing. SM was kind and gave me a cookware gift for my efforts. Well, I was tardy in getting the deed done. Then COVID came delaying me further. Finally, last month I got my little experiment done, and my conscience feels much better!
I took three different materials – conventional stainless-steel pot. Glass pan, and Salad Master pan. I added 2 ounces of organic white vinegar to each and let it sit for 36 hours. Vinegar has acetic acid which has affinity for heavy metals. I then collected the liquid vinegar and sent it in for lab analysis, marked in code. I also sent a sample of the vinegar is as a control. It was not cheap to do at the well-known metals testing lab, I assure you.
I want to share the results with you and you might want to consider these findings in decisions for cookware.
1. Salad Master pan: barium 79 ng/g, lead 18 ng/g, and nickel 31 ng/gm.
2. Conventional stainless-steel pan: barium 78 ng/g, lead 80 ng/g.
3. Glass pan: barium 77 ng/gm and lead at 5.3 ng/gm
4. Vinegar control: barium 57 ng/gm only.
This was a fair test. All had barium, originating clearly from the vinegar itself. The pans had a slightly higher concentration than the vinegar as I took the vinegar out of the bottle, and the pans had the vinegar sitting in them and perhaps evaporating some during the 36 hours, allowing for a slightly higher concentration in the subject pans than the bottled vinegar. The three pans were very consistent in the slightly higher barium concentrations easily explained by consistent evaporation leading to higher concentrations.
Barium, a heavy metal, was in the vinegar. It would not be found in stainless steel or glass. It is too reactive. I am not concerned about its presence in the vinegar. My main concern is the presence or absence of heavy metals, particularly lead.
So, I found that a conventional stainless-steel pan that we use for cooking gave up 4 times the amount of lead as did Salad Master, consistent with the company’s verbal claims to me. I cannot tell you the risk of the low-level lead release in conventional stainless steel. It would depend on use, frequency, types of foods in the pan, scratching or scraping the pan, etc. We can tolerate “background” metal ingestion - metals are in the environment. However, since the industrial revolution, lead and other metals are literally being dumped in us. Even fish has heavy metals now, including wild fish.
Salad Master released some nickel. Nickel is actually a trace mineral, likely needed by the body in ultra-trace amounts. I don’t want nickel except that found naturally in normally grown plants, however, I’d rather deal with nickel than lead, which is toxic an any amount.
I want to keep my exposure to heavy metals at a minimum, and particularly protect children, whose brains are even more vulnerable than my “older” brain.
The glass seemed the cleanest of all, however, glass is not a good conductor of heat, and energy will be wasted. So, I am pleased that we have Salad Master cookware and we are continuing to use it for our cooking purposes. (We don’t cook a lot of food, preferring raw food over heated food, however, we do frequently steam or lightly cook some food, especially in the cold months).
One note, our Salad Master cookware is 10 years old and is surgical stainless-steel vs conventional 18/10 stainless steel. I am told that Salad Master has since upgraded their cookware to include surgical titanium to create an inert environment.
Here is a link to a 2018 article which studied metal leaching. Salad Master is titanium clad and their pot did the best of all in a Nigerian look at metal leaching from cookware:
https://www.cientperiodique.com/article/CPQNN-1-3-14.pdf
Essentially, the study found Salad Master titanium clad cookware and enamel cookware to be metal leaching inert, while warning that non-such cookware can induce significant metal leaching beyond safety standards. Please do NOT use aluminum cookware under any circumstances.
If you have interest in Salad Master, Isis Israel is a terrific contact with lots of great information. Her email is: isiscooks@gmail.com
To Your Excellent Health,
Robert Jay Rowen, MD
Thanks for comments.
Titanium is used in implants. I agree, it is a mixed bag, but the Nigerian report indicated that the titanium pots were almost inert to metal leaching.
What if a person already has a nickel allergy or a sensitivity to nickel? (Which i’m guessing isn’t a true allergy, but instead is just already overloaded with nickel and cannot detox any more than already in the body).