Teflon may be great for cooking, but you might want to keep it in the kitchen cupboard the next time you make dinner.

The Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly looked into negative side effects from using Teflon-coated pots and pans for cooking, but has not officially banned the chemical from home use. That hasn't stopped one I.U. professor from getting rid of the Teflon pans in her kitchen.

“If you use them, it's going to introduce something into your body that has the potential to cause adverse effects when it's not necessary," says Diane Henshel, an associate professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs who focuses on sublethal health effects of environmental pollutants.

In fact, DuPont, the makers of Teflon, were slapped with a class-action lawsuit last year alleging that they failed to warn consumer about the problems associated with using Teflon. The company says Teflon isn't something consumers should worry about, but Henshel isn't buying it.

"DuPont is saying 'Oh, it doesn't break down like that,' but that's not true," she says. "Under ideal laboratory conditions, it is very slow to degrade, but no one would ever call a cooking situation an ideal lab situation.

"Everything breaks down with time and those coatings are going to be more likely to break down as they are being scraped, which happens in cooking situations, or when they are being used to heat something that could promote the breakdown of acids such as those in tomatoes, wine, or alcohols."

She also points out that bird-owners are warned to not have their pets near Teflon-coated pots and pans when they are in use due to some documented cases of the pets dying from Teflon fumes.

So what's a cook to do to break that Teflon habit? “Olive oil is a good alternative to Teflon because it's the healthiest of the oils," Henshel says. "Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned 'Pour a little in the pan and start cooking,'?"