Air fryers and nonstick surfaces

Air fryers have quietly become one of the most-used appliances in the American kitchen. They are fast, they crisp things well, and they use less oil than deep-frying. It is a nice piece of engineering.

They also cook on a nonstick surface. And nonstick, in almost every case, means a plastic-derived coating sitting a few millimeters from very hot air. That is worth understanding, not panicking about.

Here is what the science actually says.

What "nonstick" is made of

Most nonstick surfaces, in air-fryer baskets and frying pans alike, are built on a family of fluorinated polymers. The best-known is PTFE, better known by the brand name Teflon. It is a plastic. A slippery, heat-tolerant, chemically stubborn plastic.

To make that coating stick to a metal basket and cure properly, manufacturers have historically used other chemicals in the same family, known collectively as PFAS. PFAS are sometimes called "forever chemicals" because they break down very slowly in the environment and in the human body.

Modern coatings have moved away from the two most notorious PFAS (PFOA and PFOS), but the coating itself is still a fluorinated polymer sitting on your food's dinner plate.

What happens at air-fryer temperatures

Air fryers typically run between 300°F and 400°F. PTFE is remarkably stable in that range. It does not meaningfully break down until you push past roughly 500°F, and serious decomposition happens higher still. So under normal use, on a new basket, in good condition, the coating largely stays put.

That is the honest headline: at typical air-fryer temperatures, an intact coating is relatively stable.

The word doing the work in that sentence is intact.

What happens when the surface wears

Coatings age. Baskets get scrubbed with abrasive sponges. Metal tongs scrape the bottom. Food gets crusted on and pried off. Over months and years, tiny scratches turn into visible wear, and eventually into flaking.

A 2022 study used a technique called Raman imaging to actually count the plastic particles released from a nonstick frying pan. The researchers found that a single crack in the coating could shed roughly 9,100 microplastic particles during cooking, and a broken coating could release on the order of two million particles over the same short window [1].

Those particles are small enough that you will never see them. They go into the food, and from the food into you.

Air fryers are not identical to frying pans. The mechanical wear is different because you are not sliding a spatula across the surface. But the coatings are chemically similar, the temperatures are similar, and the basic principle holds: as the coating degrades, more of it ends up somewhere other than the basket.

PFAS is a separate question

Even when the polymer itself stays intact, a small amount of PFAS-type chemistry can migrate from cookware into food, especially as coatings age. PFAS exposure is a well-documented public health concern, with decades of accumulating evidence about links to hormone disruption, immune effects, and other health outcomes [2].

This is not the same problem as microplastic shedding. Microplastics are particles. PFAS are individual chemical compounds. They travel together in this story because they come from the same coating, but they behave differently in the body and are measured differently in the lab.

For an air-fryer user, the practical implication is the same either way: a worn or scratched coating is doing more of both.

What a reasonable person can do

You do not need to throw out your air fryer. You do need to treat the basket like the wear item it is.

• Replace baskets when the coating shows visible scratches, flaking, or bare metal.
• Skip metal utensils and abrasive scrubbers. Silicone, wood, and soft sponges keep the surface longer.
• If you are buying new, look for baskets marketed as PFAS-free ceramic or stainless. These are not perfect either, but they change the exposure profile.
• Do not preheat empty on max temperature for extended stretches.

For a broader look at what heat does to plastic across the whole kitchen — kettles, takeout containers, plastic wrap on hot food — our earlier piece on heating food in plastic covers the same territory from a different angle.

Where Winnow fits in

Winnow is formulated with probiotic strains shown in laboratory testing to bind micro- and nanoplastics.

For someone who is already trying to swap out worn cookware, filter their water, and avoid heating food in plastic, that is one more layer of steady support in a plastic-filled world. It is not a fix for the coating on your air-fryer basket. It is a fix for the fact that no kitchen habit, however careful, will make your gut a zero-plastic environment.

Steady support. Gut armor. That is the frame.

Sources

[1] Luo, Y. et al. Raman imaging for the identification of Teflon microplastics and nanoplastics released from non-stick cookware. Sci. Total Environ. 851, 158293 (2022).https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36030853/

[2] Fenton, S. E. et al. Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Toxicity and Human Health Review: Current State of Knowledge and Strategies for Informing Future Research. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 40, 606–630 (2021).https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33017053/