Yes, microwave cooking is convenient, but just how unhealthy is it? I got rid of my microwave oven 18 years ago after reading the data on it. Hopefully, you will get rid of your microwave after you read this article!
Microwave cooking was first introduced to the world about 40 years ago. Since then, we have gained more knowledge of the dangers it poses to the user’s health. Not only does it destroy all the nutrients including vitamins, minerals and the enzymes that we need to digest the food, but it also produces cancer-causing toxins (poisons) in the food.
In a microwave oven, food is heated by causing a vibration of the water contained inside the food. All foods have some degree of water contained in it. The water vibrates billions of times per second, and this turns into the steam that heats your food.
The cooking actually occurs where there is water present; therefore, what many people believed that the food is heated from the inside out is not particularly true. Since not all areas of foods contain the same amount of water, you get uneven cooking.
The inner layers of thicker types of food are cooked mostly by conduction heat from the hot outer layers inward. In addition, the heating is done with a form of radiation. In other words, your food is actually contaminated with body damaging radiation.
Not only that, when you microwave foods, you are usually doing so in a plastic container. When that plastic container is heated, poisonous chemicals contained in the plastic can leach out into the food you are heating in it.
These poisons or toxins are what we call hormone and endocrine disruptors. A few of the hormones we have in our body are estrogen (a female hormone), testosterone (a male hormone) and T3, T4 and TSH (thyroid hormones). I am only mentioning a few for example sake as this is such a large subject in itself, and not within the scope of this article.
The thyroid gland is one of the glands in the endocrine system. In other words, these poisons from the plastics may cause an unequal balance of your hormones or disrupt your endocrine system. These disruptors are also carcinogens (things that cause cancer).
Now, in addition to everything we have discussed so far, when foods are cooked at very high temperatures in conventional ovens as well as microwave ovens, three cancer-causing chemicals or poisons are formed in the food. Those three chemicals are heterocyclic amines (HCAs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and advanced glycation end products (AGEs). If you want to know more about these, you can Google them. All three of them are known carcinogens.
This microwave radiation is not unlike the radiation emitted by our cell phones and both are lumped together under a term called EMFs. EMFs are liked to an increase in neuropsychiatric conditions including depression.
Some argue that microwave radiation is not high enough to cause thermal damage, as it does not. However, it does cause massive biological damage. The tissues damaged the most by EMFs are the brain, nerves, heart tissue, testes and glands. Could this be the reason for the great increase in brain cancers and tumors, Alzheimer’s, heart arrhythmias,, anxiety, depression and male infertility?
So, just to recap, we now see how microwaving your food depletes the nutritional value in it, produces cancer causing toxins or poisons in the food and how it emits radiation just like our cell phones do.
Symptoms of microwave (EMF) sickness are insomnia, night sweats and other sleep disturbances, headaches and dizziness, depression and irritability, vision and eye problems, swollen lymph nodes and a weakened immune system, impaired cognition, nausea and loss of appetite, frequent urination and extreme thirst.
There has been a 50 percent increase in stomach and colon cancers in people under the age of 55. The most common cancers listed in descending order for 2018 are breast, lung and bronchus, colon and rectal cancer, melanoma of the skin, bladder, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, kidney and renal pelvis cancer, endometrial cancer, leukemia, pancreatic, thyroid and liver cancer.
The overall estimate for 2018 is 1,735,350 new cases, which is equivalent to 4,700 new cancer diagnoses made daily.
Tips for breaking free of your microwave oven:
I hope that I have provided you with enough information for you to get rid of your microwave oven. You can survive without it as I have for the last 18 years. You can also purchase a convection oven if you like, but I just use my plain old oven. You may have to plan ahead, but it’s worth doing it for the sake of your health.
• Take your dinner out of the freezer that morning or the night before so you don’t end up needing to defrost right before a meal.
• Make your food in bulk, and then freeze them in gallon-sized freezer bags or other freezer safe containers. Before mealtime, defrost it in a sink of water until it’s thawed enough to put into a pot, then reheat it on the stove. Prepare your meals in advance to ensure you always have a meal available when you are too tired or too busy to cook.
• Try eating organic raw foods (not meat of course). This will, in the long run, improve your health.
• A toaster oven makes a great microwave oven substitute for heating up leftovers. Put it on a low temperature (200 to 250 degrees F) and warm a plate of food over the course of 20 to 30 minutes. Or even better, use a steam convection oven.
• You can just pop it in a conventional oven preheated to 350 degrees in glass or ceramic container. If you don’t want to dirty any dishes then wrap it in parchment paper very thoroughly and set it on the oven rack for 15 to 20 minutes.
Dr. Ramona Valentine
Your article is so filled with inaccuracies that I hardly know where to begin. I am a microwave scientist with over 50 years of experience of working with microwave ovens, foods, packaging cookware, industrial microwave systems, and more. I’ve also had a huge amount of experience developing non-microwavable products and systems. Let me highlight some of your inaccuracies: 1.”microwaving your food depletes the nutritional value in it” – this has been shown to be inaccurate for many many years, there is a huge amount of scientific research that shows that microwave cooking of foods is perhaps the most healthy way of doing it since it uses very little water, so the soluble vitamins are not leached out as they would be in boiling on the stove, and also it doesn’t use extremely high temperatures so thermolabile nutrients are not damaged. 2.”produces cancer-causing toxins and poisons in the food” – microwave energy is extremely weak, weaker than ordinary light and I’m sure you don’t believe that ordinary light creates cancer causing toxins; in fact, microwave energy is millions of times weaker than ordinary light. This takes me to another issue: 3. “radiation” – you imply that this is damaging radiation such as we would receive from x-rays and gamma rays; but let me remind you that there are all kinds of radiation including what comes from your lightbulb. The former two are examples of ionizing radiation, i.e. forms of radiation that have so much energy they can destroy DNA, rip apart double bonds in molecules, etc. – that’s what makes them dangerous; on the other hand microwaves, just like ordinary light, are forms of non-ionizing radiation – this is radiation that is too weak to do any of that kind of thing. Microwave energy is many millions of times weaker than what is required to damage the molecules in the body and therefore cannot cause cancer. Your equating microwave radiation with EMF from Cell Phones and cancer is silly. The amount of microwave energy that leaks from a microwave oven, for example, is less than the energy from a tiny Christmas tree light, and I’m sure you don’t think that people can be get cancer from that. Early on in your article you try to explain why microwaves heat things and you get it wrong: it doesn’t cause water molecules the vibrate, they are already vibrating as are all molecules above something known as absolute zero (- 459.67 F) – what microwaves do is influence that vibration, and it isn’t steam that causes the food to be heated, but rather the heat that’s created as a water molecules and other molecules, not just water, become hot due to the microwaves, I could go on but I’ll stop – I think you all your readers an apology and tell them not to throw at them microwave ovens. By the way, microwaves are used to diagnose & treat cancer.