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Are Microwave Ovens Harmful to Health? Finding Better Research in an Age of Snopes.
Are Microwaves bad for you? Do they degrade the nutrients in your food? elephantjournal.com reports.
via Lindsey Wolf, an elephantjournaldotcom classic. Michael Pollan, in today’s Sunday NY Times, reports that 90% of American households have a microwave. Hard to believe that high.
My new apartment has a microwave. When I moved in, my first thought was about unplugging it, storing it, and using that precious space that it took up in my mini-kitchen. Then I got sick. Then I realized that I could heat up water for tea in the microwave faster than on the stove. So I started to wonder. What are the facts regarding health hazards of microwave cooking? Was I actually doing myself more harm than good?
I like to do research. It shouldn’t have been too challenging to find some quick answers from reliable sources, right? Not so easy. It seems that microwave oven safety issues are still in urban-legend land, with several outrageous entries on Snopes (the myth buster website favored by Moms everywhere). Several other websites were simply circulating the same dated articles. There seems to be little recent research, other than an interesting NY Times article about how microwaves could be used to kill potentially invasive organisms on ships that are carried to other ports affecting ecosystems.
Like many things, this also seems to depend on the source and who you trust. According to Consumer Product Safety Commission data via Consumer Reports, about 4,000 Americans incur injuries from microwave ovens every year, including burns and scalds. A risk I hadn’t even considered.
But what about radiation exposure? The killing of food nutrients? The latter was demystified by another NY Times article that refers to research done at Cornell University, which concluded that, “every cooking method can destroy vitamins and other nutrients in food. The factors that determine the extent are how long the food is cooked, how much liquid is used and the cooking temperature.” (Here’s where the raw foodies would chime in). The radiation question is more frightening. The FDA itself states that it isn’t entirely known what happens to people exposed over a period of time to low levels of microwaves and that long-term studies involving people have not been done. See some safety tips here.
There are also significant warnings out there for mothers regarding the lack of safety in heating milk in the microwave, and for those who understandably like the ease of pre-packaged meals with plastic coverings, which are also of questionable safety.
I’m increasingly thinking though about where my food comes from in addition to how healthful it is. In that spirit, a writer from Slow Food also gave me a good reminder. It’s about “knowing your food.” How easy is that to do when (although it’s been busted as a myth and I still do it) you’re supposed to stand five feet away from the oven? It’s certainly not stirring a pot with appreciation while taking in the aromas of the food.
Perhaps newer research doesn’t need to be done after Swiss, German and Russian studies concluded years ago of the microwave oven’s questionable safety. So for now, out it goes. I’m going to get myself a tea kettle and start looking into the hazards of electromagnetic fields which appear to be dangerous and not as easy to avoid as an appliance.
Microwave radiation is closer to radio waves and infrared radiation (heat) than it is to X-rays and Gamma rays (the ones that mess with your cells).
That would make Microwave ovens no more harmful than other appliances that emit electromagnetic fields (e.g. TVs and cells phones).
Check out the link to see the electromagnetic spectrum.
http://tinyurl.com/58kh9m
intuitively, they have just scared me since i was a kid…have never had one and never will.
Steven Whitacre (Los Angeles, CA) Today at 6:19am
Concur. Microwaves are not considered harmful ionizing radiation. They tend to heat up water, metal, and certain other molecules; if they were to heat you or anything you’d touch up to a dangerous extent, you’d feel the heat.
Its not so much what the waves do to you-its what they do to your food. Check out Dr. Masaru Emoto’’s “Hidden Messages in Water” Many things can change the molecular structure of the water and make it more viable to life and healthy-or totally screw up the structure. There are pictures. What finished me on microwaves all together was the fact that the structure of the water that was microwaved looked a lot like the stucture of the water that had the word “satan” programmed into it. It looked like a black hole. No structure whatsoever. The water would NOT crystalize.
ALSO, Your food has important proteins, vitamins, and minerals in it. When the food is cooked like this(microwaves heat up your food by spinning or vibrating the water molecules at a such a high rate-that it heats up) it degenerates all the protein structures, rendering them useless and even toxic. Wala! once nutritiously dense food-rendered void of all the good stuff and possibly toxic.
https://www.hado.net/
All really thoughtful and helpful comments, thank you so much for contributing!
I too have wondered about this a lot, kept it for popcorn and water, and then eventually got rid of the damn thing. For me it is an intuitive thing. I must admit I believe that food contains a mysterious and unquantifiable thing called “energy,” “chi,” or “lifeforce” and while cooking in any way can diminish this, microwaves seem as if they would well, nuke it.
Intuitively, if you live in fear isn’t that an additional stress that is also conterproductive to your health ??
From a natural health perspective there is just something odd about vibrating all the water molecules in your food to the same frequency. You end up giving yourself the resonant remedy of “microwave” every time you ingest the stuff.
This isn’t any kind of issue from a gross health perspective but if you are interested in the quality of undisturbed life force in your food you could do a lot better than warming it in the microwave.
Jennifer Blair Today at 11:10am
microwaves are bad…umm kay?
Denise Cook (Denver, CO) Today at 4:11pm
Finally, hello Micowaves, de-aminize an egg, what do you think happens to the nutiriton of food? What do you think happens to us when wwe stand near ones that leak? Fetal exposre…don’t get me started…
[...] fix it. It’s healthy to be aware of how things in your life work. It’s the same reason I just got rid of my microwave. I have no idea how that crazy shit works. So without further adieu here is the monster I have [...]
So very glad I found this truly great site
No one is really citing any scientific evidence. So is baking with an electric coil any better? Imagine the electromagnetic fields coming from an electric oven. I too long had this notion that the microwave is bad, but I don't see any evidence of it, other than ignorance of how something works. I don't know how microwaves work, but that doesn't make me scared of them.
Interestingly, the article even states that studies have not proven that using microwaves is harmful to humans. Yet, we tend to hear and think what we want to hear and think. My father is an expert in radio-chemistry (professor at Macalester College). It is my understanding that cooking food in mircowaves is perfectly safe as long as you don't cook food in plastic bowls, bottles, or other plastic materials. Indeed, it's safer than grilling meat (which turns the fats into carcinogenic material). Since it is known that microwaves don't cook food evenly, it's best to either not heat milk or formula for babies in microwaves, or to be sure to shake the bottle well if you do (and don't do it in plastic bottles, note: warming up plastic bottles in hot water causes the same toxic problem – plastic that is heated -no matter how – taints food and is not healthy for human consumption). And, to those who fear standing next to mircowave ovens, FYI, if you stand too near a tomato plant you're exposing yourself to higher levels of radiation than if you stand near a microwave. Tomato plant leaves have far higher radiation than background levels. Curiously, aside from the spend fuel rods, coal burning power plants put out more radiation into our atmosphere than nuclear power plants do.
oh.. and on a related note, those of us who enjoy rock climbing and bouldering expose ourselves to higher than background radiation too as the rocks themselves emit radiation (and we're putting our chests and family jewels right up next to them for long periods of time too – something people don't tend to do with their microwave ovens).
Heck, people's granite countertops emit radiation and can generate radon gas – and we spend more time leaning over those than we do standing next to our microwave ovens. Nuclear caused deaths remind me of people's fears of flying in airplanes. They're statistically far safer than driving in cars, but it "seems" more dangerous.
revised version of my last comment: (please delete the previous one – thanks : )
Heck, people's granite countertops emit radiation and can generate radon gas – and we spend more time leaning over those than we do standing next to our microwave ovens. Microwave ovens remind me of people's fears of flying in airplanes. They're statistically far safer than driving in cars, but they "seem" more dangerous.