Protecting Your Family's Health: The Kitchen Swaps Worth Making

Most of this isn't about fear. It's about noticing the small, repeated choices in a kitchen that add up over years, and swapping the ones that are easy to swap.

None of this is about becoming precious or perfect. It's about the low-effort, high-frequency stuff, the things you touch or heat something in every single day, where a small change compounds over time.

Chopping boards: wood over plastic

Every knife stroke on a plastic board shaves off tiny plastic particles, and they end up wherever you're chopping, straight into whatever you're about to eat. A wooden board scars the same way but doesn't shed plastic into your food. Simple swap, no real downside.

Cleaning utensils: skip the plastic

Plastic scourers and brushes break down with every scrub, especially on abrasive surfaces, shedding microplastic fibres into the sink and eventually the water system. Wooden-handled brushes, natural loofah, or coconut fibre scourers do the same job without the shedding.

Beeswax over synthetic candles

Most synthetic candles are paraffin wax, a petroleum by-product, and burning them releases soot and volatile organic compounds into the air you're breathing indoors. Beeswax burns cleaner and doesn't carry the same petroleum baggage.

Parchment paper over tin foil

Cooking acidic or salty food directly against foil, think tomatoes, citrus, vinegar marinades, causes small amounts of aluminium to leach into the food, more so at higher heat. Parchment paper sidesteps that entirely.

Glass food storage over plastic containers

Plastic containers can leach chemicals into food, especially with age, scratches, or heat, and they hold onto smells and stains in a way glass simply doesn't. Glass is inert. It's not doing anything to what's inside it.

Not microwaving in plastic (or much at all)

This one has real, recent research behind it. A 2023 study in Environmental Science & Technology found that microwaving plastic containers released hundreds of thousands of microplastic and nanoplastic particles into food in just a few minutes, with old or scratched containers shedding roughly twice as many particles as new ones. A separate University of Nebraska-Lincoln study found similar results with plastic baby food containers, and reported that a large share of lab cells died after exposure to the released particles. Heat is the accelerant here, so if it's going in the microwave, put it on a plate first.

Glass or stainless steel kettles over plastic kettles

A plastic kettle boils water against plastic every single day, repeatedly, at the highest heat a kitchen appliance reaches. Stainless steel or glass doesn't introduce anything extra into water that's about to become your tea, your coffee, or your ENRICHD mushroom brew.

Glass or stainless steel bottles over plastic bottles

Same logic, different vessel. Reused plastic bottles degrade with washing, heat, and sunlight exposure, and that degradation is exactly when they shed the most. Steel and glass don't degrade the same way.

Loose-leaf tea over bagged tea

Some modern tea bags are partly plastic (usually nylon or PET, sometimes used to seal the bag or give it that pyramid shape), and steeping one in near-boiling water is about as aggressive a scenario as you can put a plastic in. A 2024 study from the Autonomous University of Barcelona found that tea bags released millions of microplastic and nanoplastic particles per millilitre of boiling water, and that human intestinal cells readily absorbed them. There's genuine scientific disagreement on the exact numbers (an earlier, widely-cited 2019 study was later challenged for overcounting), but the direction of the finding holds up: plastic tea bags in near-boiling water isn't nothing.

I fell for this one myself, early on. One of the big tea brands brought out these beautiful-looking bags in kraft brown packaging, looked wholesome, looked eco. Turned out the bags themselves were plastic. Pour boiling water over that and steep it, and you're drinking exactly the stuff this section is warning about. Loose-leaf sidesteps the question completely, and it's how we do all of our ENRICHD teas, no bags, no question mark over what's in your cup.

Stainless steel or cast iron over scratched non-stick

Non-stick coatings are usually PTFE (Teflon), and a 2022 study using Raman spectroscopy found that ordinary daily use, even with wooden utensils, causes tiny abrasions that shed PTFE particles into food, worse once a pan is visibly scratched. Heat a badly scratched non-stick pan hot enough and the coating itself can start to break down. Cast iron and stainless steel don't have a coating to lose in the first place.

I went through the wok and non-stick phase myself, early days at university, cheap and fast and convenient. Realised fairly quickly it was a bit of a nightmare and moved over to cast iron and stainless steel. Never looked back.

Plug-in air fresheners and synthetic scents

Never fell for this one myself. Plug-in air fresheners and synthetic "air-cleaning" products work by continuously releasing synthetic fragrance compounds into the air you're breathing indoors, on a loop, all day, which rather defeats the point of clean air.

Where I'll hold my hand up is going a bit heavy on burning palo santo and sage for a stretch. Natural doesn't mean harmless when it's smoke, you're still breathing in particulates either way. I've eased off since, and keep the room properly ventilated when I do burn anything now.

Where mushrooms fit into this

Worth being careful with this one, so no overclaiming: there's no research showing mushrooms remove microplastics from the body directly. What the research does show is beta-glucan, the fibre found in oats and in mushrooms like ours, helping the body eliminate PFAS ("forever chemicals"), by binding them in the gut and promoting excretion rather than reabsorption. Dr. Rhonda Patrick has covered this one in detail: mice given high PFAS exposure and fed beta-glucan over six weeks had significantly lower PFAS levels, and in a small human study, 72 men taking 3g of beta-glucan a day for four weeks saw a decline in serum PFAS. Early days, and the strongest data so far is on PFAS specifically rather than microplastics generally, but it's a genuinely credible mechanism with real human data behind it now, not just theory.

It's part of why beta-glucan-rich mushrooms sit at the centre of our own daily ritual regardless, alongside the swaps above rather than instead of them (oats count too, for what it's worth). Our Reishi and the Seven Mix are both among our higher beta-glucan extracts, if that's a compound you want more of in your day.

The point of all this

None of these swaps need doing all at once, and none of them are about perfection. It's the daily, repeated, high-heat stuff, kettles, microwaves, tea, cookware, that's worth prioritising first, since that's where most of the actual exposure happens. Do those, and you've covered most of it.

I've fallen for my share of other fads outside the kitchen too, fat-free dieting, and running excessively through my late teens, chasing whatever the trend of the moment was. Took a while to find an actual balance rather than swinging between extremes. Kitchen swaps are the easy part. The rest takes longer.

Written by Rich Founder of @enrichdsuperfoods.