Cooking With Foil: Is It Safe? We Test Lasagna, Salmon, & Others | Talking Point | Full Episode

Summary

The video from CNA Insider explores the safety concerns around using aluminum foil in cooking, particularly with acidic foods. It features a series of experiments and expert insights to determine how much aluminum might leach into food during cooking processes. The findings suggest that while some leaching does occur, the levels are generally low and not typically harmful to most people. However, the elderly and individuals with kidney issues may be more susceptible to aluminum buildup. The video also highlights alternatives to foil, using organic materials for cooking.

Highlights

• Aluminum foil has replaced tin foil due to being cheaper and more flexible. 🥫
• Aluminum might leach into food, primarily with acidic ingredients under heat. 🔥🍋
• Excessive aluminum in the body can cause health issues, mimicking conditions such as dementia. 🧠
• Tests show low levels of leaching, but caution is advised for the elderly and those with kidney concerns. ⚠️👨‍⚕️
• Organic materials like banana leaves may offer a flavorful and safer cooking alternative. 🍌

Key Takeaways

• Aluminum foil is a kitchen staple but raises safety concerns, especially with acidic foods. 🔍
• Experiments show some aluminum can leach into food, but levels are generally low and safe. ⚗️
• Elderly and those with kidney issues should be cautious with aluminum foil. 🧓
• Natural alternatives like banana leaves can be used instead of foil. 🍃
• Aluminum buildup in the body can mimic conditions like dementia or cause bone softening. 🧠🦴

Overview

The video delves into the everyday kitchen dilemma of using aluminum foil for cooking. Exploring whether aluminum foil is truly a safe choice, it examines its interaction with acidic foods and what that means for our health. 🍳

Professor Eric Chan and a team of researchers conduct tests to reveal how much aluminum might be seeping into food. Findings show low leaching, but still raise flags for cautious use, especially for vulnerable populations. 📊

Alternative cooking methods featured include using banana leaves and other organic materials, adding unique flavors and minimizing aluminum exposure. It’s a flavorful journey into safer, healthier cooking practices. 🌿

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Aluminum Foil This chapter introduces the topic of aluminum foil, a common item in many kitchens. It raises questions about its usage and safety, noting feedback from viewers and the presence of online articles debating its benefits and drawbacks.
• 01:00 - 02:30: History of Aluminum Foil The chapter begins by addressing concerns and warnings related to using aluminum foil, particularly in food preparation. It raises the question of how safe aluminum foil is for such uses. To answer this question, the chapter plans to delve into understanding what aluminum foil exactly is.
• 02:30 - 04:30: Reactions of Aluminum Foil with Acidic Foods The chapter discusses the evolution of food wrapping materials, tracing the transition from tin foil to aluminum foil. Initially, tin foil was used to preserve food by blocking moisture, light, and contamination, but it imparted an undesirable taste to food. As a result, in 1910, aluminum foil, which was cheaper and more flexible, replaced tin foil and became a popular choice for food wrapping.
• 04:30 - 06:30: Effects of Aluminum in the Human Body This chapter explores the use of aluminum, especially in the form of foil, in historical and modern contexts. It highlights an incident from 1940 when a salesperson, facing a shortage of pans, used aluminum foil as a makeshift cooking tool during Thanksgiving. This event marked the beginning of aluminum foil's popularity in culinary applications. Today, aluminum foil is made from an alloy that typically comprises 92% aluminum.
• 06:30 - 09:00: Experiment: Testing Aluminum Foil in Cooking The chapter discusses concerns about aluminum in cooking, specifically using aluminum foil. Professor Eric Chan, an expert in how the body absorbs foreign materials, is introduced. Although the transcript is incomplete, it hints at exploring the implications of cooking with aluminum foil and potentially includes a comparison using lemon, tomato, or tomato sauce. There is a brief, unrelated mention of coffee.
• 09:00 - 13:30: Results of the Aluminum Leaching Test The chapter titled 'Results of the Aluminum Leaching Test' begins with a conversation comparing the sharpness of acidic foods, reminiscent of black vinegar used with dumplings. The dialogue indicates that such foods should not be consumed on an empty stomach. The main focus is on the fact that acidic foods, like those mentioned, can cause reactions when used with aluminum foil. This interaction is known and has been warned about in several online articles, highlighting the potential risks of using aluminum with acidic ingredients. The test results presumably delve into the effects and safety considerations of such practices.
• 13:30 - 18:00: Galvanic Corrosion in Storage The chapter discusses galvanic corrosion in storage environments. It begins with a demonstration involving concentrated acid being poured into a container, producing visible fumes. The water acts as a control in this experiment. The chapter is likely focused on the chemical reactions involved in corrosion, particularly in the presence of acids.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Organic Alternatives to Aluminum Foil The chapter discusses the chemical reaction between aluminum foil and acid, observed through the formation of small bubbles indicating erosion. This erosion may lead to aluminum leaching into food upon contact.
• 21:00 - 22:00: Conclusions on Aluminum Foil Usage This chapter discusses the use of aluminum foil in cooking, particularly focusing on its interaction with food when subjected to heat. It is noted that aluminum foil does not react with water at room temperature. However, when heat is applied during cooking, it can enhance reactions, especially between the acidic components of food and the aluminum oxide surface of the foil. The acid levels in food are typically much lower than those discussed in academic scenarios.

Cooking With Foil: Is It Safe? We Test Lasagna, Salmon, & Others | Talking Point | Full Episode Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 aluminium foil it's a staple in our kitchens we don't think twice about using it but should we well some of our viewers certainly think so we received several emails on the issue there are also many articles onl L
• 00:30 - 01:00 that warn against using aluminum foil how safe is aluminium foil to use for food well I'm going to find out for [Music] you to find out if aluminum foil is dangerous let's break down what exactly is aluminium foil well aluminium foil
• 01:00 - 01:30 didn't always start as aluminium foil this cheap convenient and flexible way to wrap food first started its life as tin foil tin foil was a way of preserving food because it could block moisture light and contamination but people complained it added a tint taste to food so in 1910 the tin was replaced by the cheaper and more flexible aluminium at first it was mainly used
• 01:30 - 02:00 for food packaging but in 1940 when an industrial foil salesperson ran out of pans during his Thanksgiving dinner he decided to use the foil as makeshift cook Weare and was surprised by how perfectly his food turned out and that's when we started using foil for cooking today aluminium foil is made of an aloy that typically contains 92 to
• 02:00 - 02:30 99% aluminium so why should we be worried about aluminium in our [Music] food this is Professor Eric Chan his research specializes in how our body absorbs and processes foreign materials lemon tomato tomato sauce and let me ask you what is this I hope it's coffee oh it's not
• 02:30 - 03:00 it makes me think of dumpling black vinegar yes you're right it's vinegar what do they have in common uh oh gosh uh I wouldn't consume them on an empty stomach okay um that is quite close to the answer they are all known as acidic food there you go okay yes I'm sure you have come across online articles that warn against the use of aluminum foil with acidic food this is because aluminium foil May react with
• 03:00 - 03:30 food containing acid let me show you let me pour the concentrated acid into the baker woo I can see the fumes yes this is water so the water acts as a control right you are absolutely right and now I'm going to place the
• 03:30 - 04:00 aluminium foil first into the acid and next into the water what we observing now uh acid uh can actually react with aluminium foil so if You observe carefully now you'll start to see small bubbles forming yes the surface layer is uh disrupted is eroded this uh give rise to the possibility of aluminium leing into the food when it comes into contact if you look at the control
• 04:00 - 04:30 experiment now the foil is actually not reacting with the water right however when I'm cooking I'm adding heat to the food plus the foil does that make any difference yes indeed adding heat will actually uh promote the reactions so in the case of uh cooking food with aluminum foil when we add heat to the process it can actually promote Direction between that low level of acid with the surface aluminum oide the acid concentration in our food is much lower than what Professor Chan
• 04:30 - 05:00 is showing me in the lab but the presence of high heat can increase the acidic reaction many of our foods contain acid but some of the highest include commonly used ingredients such as citrus fruits tomatoes and tomato sauce vinegar and pickled dishes as well as spicy foods all of which can react with foil what happens when our body ingests aluminium aluminium will first be uh
• 05:00 - 05:30 absorbed through the intestine into the body and then it subsequently get distributed to various parts of our body including the brain the lung the liver the kidney and also the bone and what happens is when somebody is overly exposed to aluminium this can lead to bioaccumulation what is bioaccumulation bioc cumulation is a process where the input of aluminium into a body actually is uh much faster than its excretion of
• 05:30 - 06:00 the kidney and gradually the lever in the body will increase over time so it builds up yes so aluminium is actually not an essential matter in our body unlike calcium iron or magnesium so what happen is if aluminium gets into certain organ like in the brain it can create a conditions that mimic dementia on the other hand if the aluminium gets into the bone it can replace the calcium and cause a conditional known as aluminium
• 06:00 - 06:30 ostomia which is actually a softening of the bone oh goodness yeah so because it is a matter it can actually replace certain essential matter in our body for instance if it takes over iron in red blood cells then it can cause Almia I see so basically if you have higher levels of aluminium in your body it can mess up uh the good work that the other types of metals are doing yes you're right that doesn't sound good to me uh viewers should understand that the bio accumulation of aluminium depends on how
• 06:30 - 07:00 much is being consumed which is the dose uh how much is being absorbed which is the bioavailability and how much is being excreted out into the urine via the kidney which is the excretion so the risk comes when the dose is higher than the ability of our kidney in removing the aluminium into the urine it sounds that there are really many variables at play here and the only variable that I can control here is the dosage so I need to find out how much aluminium is leeching into our food if at all okay
• 07:00 - 07:30 Diana how about you go and do a test bring back the result and we have a discussion just how much aluminium is leeching by cooking with acidic Foods I'm taking Professor Chan's suggestion by conducting a [Music] test and I've got a professional chef to help me get started we are doing five dishes that is
• 07:30 - 08:00 actually very commoning cook at home heavily using aluminum foil okay and this five dishes involve things like baking uh roasting grilling and also barbecuing let's get cooking we've chosen five dishes which include acidic [Music] ingredients lasagna with tomato sauce and cheese cheese is dairy and acidic this dish is foiled to death is baked in
• 08:00 - 08:30 a foil container and I'm going to smother it in foil this is going to be a good lasagna baked salmon with Asian spices and citrus fruits okay cajun chicken with lots of spice and pickled onions as well as squid with a spicy sbal sauce and camans corn which is mildly acidic bathed in
• 08:30 - 09:00 [Music] but for each of the dishes we're also cooking a version without foil as a control shall we pop it in the oven [Music]
• 09:00 - 09:30 [Music] all done thank you John and we will sent all these to the lab for [Music] testing the results will take a week [Music]
• 09:30 - 10:00 [Music] it's been a week since I sent our food samples to a lab to find out if the aluminum from the foil we use is finding its way into the food we eat
• 10:00 - 10:30 the results are out I'm heading back to Professor Eric Chan to make sense of the numbers the results shows that except for samb song Here the rest of the food type has aluminum level of less than 1.5 milligram per kg it is a result that tells us that the level is very low okay so I suppose for users of foil like me that's really good news but I do have
• 10:30 - 11:00 one curiosity why is it that only the squid or the soong saw different levels okay so for the case of sambal saong or squid the level that's detected in the control where we did not use the aluminum foil is about 5 MGR per kg this is actually quite consistent with the level of aluminium detected in soong or squid as it is known to be naturally occurring in squid on the other hand when we subject the song to cooking in
• 11:00 - 11:30 aluminium foil we actually detected a two-fold increase in the aluminum level this confirms that aluminium has niched from the foil into the food so then my question is the amount of aluminium that was detected in our experiment is that harmful to me how bad is that so the food and agricultural organization and the World Health Organization they have stipulated the provisional intolerable weekly intake of
• 11:30 - 12:00 ptwi of aluminium to be 2 mg per kg body weight per Weg it's like a pinch of salt or less than that based on this understanding and assuming that now if somebody consume uh aluminium it is not 100% absorb approximately 0.1 to 1% of aluminium is absorbed in the testin so assuming um the scenario where aluminium
• 12:00 - 12:30 is Leed from the foil into a saon and assuming average saon that weighs about 250 g the aluminium that found in the saong is really very tiny based on this we calculated and estimated that for a average man of body weight 75 Kg to reach the stipulated provisional intolerable weekly intake of 2 Mig per kg body weight per week
• 12:30 - 13:00 he will need to eat about 6,000 saon per week in order to reach that intolerable threshold just how much is 6,000 squids on this table is 10 servings of squid we'll need to eat more than 600 tables worth of squid in a week to hit dangerous absorption levels of aluminum so can I conclude that it is generally safe for me to cook food and
• 13:00 - 13:30 foil it is safe for the general population but the elderly and those with kidney disease they may be more susceptible okay why is that so the kidney actually functions to remove the aluminium from our body into the urine so when the kidney is unhealthy this excretion process is compromised and this may lead to accumulation of aluminium in the body even though aluminium foil may come into direct contact with our food we aren't seeing high levels of leeching
• 13:30 - 14:00 from our tests this is because aluminium foil naturally has a protective layer aluminium when exposed to oxygen in the air becomes aluminium oxide this forms a thin layer on the surface of the foil this is what makes aluminium foil safe because it prevents raw aluminium from touching our food it is when heat acid or salt break down this Al aluminium oxide layer that aluminium
• 14:00 - 14:30 leeching begins to occur I am so glad that our test results show that aluminum foil is pretty safe to use because I've got a lot of it in my kitchen Diana yeah I think we need to look at this what's this a lasagna cell is a weird thing that happens spontaneously when you store a lasagna in a steel pan and cover it with aluminum foil small holes form in the aluminum in an electrochemical process
• 14:30 - 15:00 called galvanic corrosion and that galvanic corrosion leaves little spots of corroded aluminum on the lasagna surface corroded aluminium in my food that's gotten me concerned does this mean using foil for storage could be a problem even without heat like the viral video I'm going to put cooked lasagna in a steel pan and store it in the fridge it will be
• 15:00 - 15:30 wrapped in a layer of aluminium [Music] foil oh my look at this it's definitely a hole in my foil H this is really interesting let's check it out inside it's exactly like what I saw in the video there's a teeny weeny bit of foil on top of my food as well what's happening
• 15:30 - 16:00 [Music] here I'm bringing my lasagna experiment to food scientist Professor William Chen Prof so what's happening here ah interesting there's some kind of corrosion we see here what's inside it's
• 16:00 - 16:30 lasagna have a look corrosion of the aluminium foil you mean I see yes yes yes that's why you see the holes here and there and what we can suspect is that there's a sort of a battery effect a battery effect can you elaborate a little bit more about the battery effect and how that works so if we look at the normal battery being in the car in our household appliances we see uh one is a cattle the other one is anode in between
• 16:30 - 17:00 there's some electrolyte iron that create the current so this is a perhaps what is happening here you have two pieces of metal one is a cathode the other one is an anode and then in between you have this lasia which contain the citric acid and the salt that is a perfect formula to create the current in between the two method this thing sort of create certain uh battery effect leading to the corrosion we see the whole day because of the battery
• 17:00 - 17:30 effect uh this uh aluminum is broken down from the tin fo and migr into the lasagna now so that's why you see stain of aluminum on the on the food so what you saying is that this is literally a lasagna battery yes uh effectively but to really demonstrate how it works maybe we can uh set up experiment to illustrate the point
• 17:30 - 18:00 hi this is my research student Yong she will show you the experiment okay so um here we have a plate of luxia on a steel container so basically what is happening is that there is an electric current running between the aluminium foil and the steel container yeah so I'm going to connect Ying Tong is hooking up my tray of lasia to a machine which will show us if there is a flow of electrical current detected
• 18:00 - 18:30 yeah so you can see that there is a jump in the voltage reading I see so there's literally some microcurrent flowing through the lasagna yes that's right okay you had explained earlier on that for this effect to happen it takes two different types of metal in this case we have the foil and we have the steel container what if the container was changed to a glass or a plastic container but we get the same effect if you change to glass or plastic or or ceramic uh which is not metal basically then you
• 18:30 - 19:00 will not see this uh battery effect So to avoid the corrosion on the foil if I don't like the taste of aluminum foil in my food I should just avoid metallic containers that's correct that is a good tip and I have taken note of it I mean I don't want to eat corroded foil along with my food especially when there may be minute amounts of it that I can't see with my naked eye but if you belong to a vulnerable group and your kidneys aren't
• 19:00 - 19:30 strong enough to get rid of the aluminium in your body then you may want alternatives to [Music] foil Kurt sombero is a chef who prefers to swap out aluminum foil in favor of organic materials to impart more flavors into his dishes while keeping his use of foil to a minimum
• 19:30 - 20:00 so we're using organic materials that is gifted from us from Mother Nature so we're using uh green coconut we're simmering some beautiful curry in there and then we got here a beautiful corn that is uh cooked in its own husk and then we got here some chicken uh wrapped in banana leaf with some mango Curry inside and then we got some sbal Stingray that has turmeric leaf and then Banana Leaf as well turmeric Leaf yes madame wow so Banana Leaf is quite common but I didn't know that you can
• 20:00 - 20:30 also use turmeric leaves so why do you use these organic materials for me as a cookus a chef it imparts a lot of flavors organic materials it's safe for us as well I can't wait to taste test all right so we got here your uh Stingray uh marinated and then uh cooked in banana leaf and the turmeric there you go wish you can smell this thank
• 20:30 - 21:00 you so the taste of the leaves is very mild in the stingray but it's kind of there and it just makes it a pleasure I guess not just on your palette but also for your nose because you can smell the aroma yeah an idea is that whatever foil does when cooking is to get the moisture back or within it's uh it's ingredient so basically nature
• 21:00 - 21:30 designed that with itself using this kind of ingredients do you use any aluminum foil in your kitchen at all running a commercial kitchen is very difficult to just switch on to no plastic or no foil forever but the goal for me is to use less of it every single time and then it's going to be a habit that uh everybody should be able to attain eventually one day I would suggest that using aluminum foil it
• 21:30 - 22:00 always has to be not an abundance so you keep it moderate because obviously if you cook it in a high temperature it's going to leak out to the food even though you use it once but how about if you use it every day just to put a barrier between your food and then the foil would be a lot better to put either say uh a baking paper or let's say some uh Banana Leaf to uh make sure that it's not touching your food because it uh lowers down the the transfer of foil in
• 22:00 - 22:30 your food thanks to Chef CT I'm now inspired to try using some of these materials for my cooking next time and after deep diving into aluminium foil I'm happy to know that I haven't been poisoning myself all these years from cooking with aluminium foil Chef shall we again please do I'm going to try the prawn [Music]