Dangers of Microwave Cooking
July 15th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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I found a couple interesting Dr. Mercola articles via Kishore Balakrishnan’s Blog:
1. Hidden Hazards of Microwave Cooking
2. The Proven Dangers of Microwaves
These articles claim that microwave cooking makes food more carcinogenic, decreases food value by destroying nutrients, and creates unnatural substances that shouldn’t be consumed by humans. Listed side effects of eating microwaved food include long-term brain damage, altered hormone production, tumors/cancer, a weakened immune system, memory loss, and decreased intelligence.
Sounds like the same list of negative side effects of other things I’ve stopped putting in my mouth — animals, dairy, eggs, caffeine, fluoride — so perhaps it’s time for me to reevaluate my microwave oven usage as well. I actually don’t think it would be that hard for me to do without.
July 15th, 2005 at 7:49 pm
That’s true, microwave ovens are evil and food cooked in them tastes like crap. The article also says you shouldn’t even been close to a microwave oven when it is being used, but what is a safe distance? I won’t convince anyone at home to stop using it, but I’ would like to know if I’d have to leave the kitchen when they use it to be safe. I use an electric oven instead, I think that’s safe eh? and food tastes much better…
July 15th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
unnatural substances? warming blood in a microwave? etc. etc.
I’m no chemist or physicist, but this sounds awfully paranoid and fishy. Blood is a delicate thing and I don’t think you can just toss it in the microwave and heat it quickly like that. Seems like quite a red herring to me.
And I’m curious as to what amount the “unnatural” changes can be attributed to the rapid heating itself rather than any microwave effects.
In any case, I’m definately not ready to toss out my microwave or cell phone. And you have to remember that just about any restaurant uses a microwave for thawing, heating bread, etc. etc.
July 15th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
Steve, I find it interesting that you don’t use flouride products. From what I know, flouride is somewhat toxic in large doses, but how exactly do you clean your teeth? Care to elaborate?
July 15th, 2005 at 10:13 pm
I skimmed that article, and frankly I think most of it is a load of BS. The author seems to go in circles a lot, and provides examples that don’t support his claims — for instance, that it’s not recommended to heating a baby’s bottle: “Although microwaves heat food quickly, they are not recommended for heating a baby’s bottle. The bottle may seem cool to the touch, but the liquid inside may become extremely hot and could burn the baby’s mouth and throat.” This quote says nothing about the liquid in the bottle becoming toxic due to being heated by the microwave. The fact that the liquid may be hotter than the bottle is very obvious since microwaves heat water molecules. Glass and plastic molecules are totally unaffected, thus the liquid inside a container can get a lot hotter than the container itself (if you let it stand for a while after heating though, the container will get hot too).
He also uses an example of a patient dying because blood used in transfusion was heated in a microwave. What does this prove? That microwaves damage living tissue? This is pretty obvious as well (and whoever heated the blood in this way was not very smart). You’re not going to put your cat in the microwave to dry it (I hope!
). If anything, this shows that plant/animal cells get damaged by microwaves. However, the same cells are also damaged when placed in a freezer, where the water crystalizes and cells are torn to pieces when the water inside them expands. Microwaves heat the water inside a cell which can of course damage it, but heating it with fire or freezing it will damage it too, just differently.
Of course I’m not saying that microwaves don’t emit harmful radiation (though in small doses or we would all long ago get cancer from them), but this is very different than saying that food heated in a microwave is dangerous. Frying food probably creates way more carcinogens than microwaving it. If there’s anything he proves with his references, it’s that microwaves will cause you harm if you’re exposed to them in large doses, which nobody is denying.
July 15th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
By the way, I just noticed that you have “fluoride” in the list of “bad things to put in your mouth.” Do you mean that you don’t drink fluoridated water, or that you don’t use fluoridated toothpaste? If it’s the former, well, I don’t drink flouridated water either but I’d still like to hear why it’s bad. If it’s the latter, what do you use to keep your teeth from turning into mush?
(especially since I don’t think it’s possible to get a toothpaste without fluoride)
July 15th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
I use qigong to maintain my health and do not worry too much about what I eat. It gives my body the ability to handle a more hostile environment and still be healthy.
July 15th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Steve,
Please check out:
http://www.cspinet.org/nah/04_05/microwavemyths.pdf
from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
“Hertel didn’t actually find that microwaved food caused cancer. And his “study,” which no researchers have tried to reproduce, was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.”
“The “evidence” that microwaved foods cause cancer boils down to Hans Hertel’s and William Kopp’s claims. “There is nothing solid,” says Lawrence Livermore’s Jim Felton, who is also associate director for cancer control at the Cancer Center at the University of California, Davis. That may explain why scientists haven’t spent time and money looking for a link. “I can honestly tell you that I have never seen a valid scientific study— and I pay attention to most of the cooking research out there—that has given us reason to test whether microwaving food could cause cancer,” says Felton. “In fact, my research suggests just the opposite.””
Food for thought.
July 15th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
Via Wikipedia:
Controversial hazards
[edit]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven
Food
There exists an anti-microwave lobby that claims that there exist more subtle dangers than the ones listed above associated with cooking in a microwave oven. It is claimed that microwave cooking causes more loss of nutrients than conventional cooking and that microwave radiation leads to chemical reactions in the food that are different from those occurring during conventional heating. There is no accepted scientific validity to these claims and they are looked upon by scientists and skeptics in general as being alarmist and pseudoscientific to the point of ridiculousness. These issues are presented, in a one-sided fashion, in the following websites:
Followed by a link to the website you have mentioned in your post.
Not sure who’s right here, but whatever that site says should be taken with a grain of salt.
July 15th, 2005 at 11:53 pm
Maybe it’s because I work in science, but these articles raise all sorts of red flags. First of all this work was never peer reviewed and has never been corroborated by subsequent findings. This is one of those cut-and-paste memes that have been circling the internet for many years. You can find it on USENET in the early 90’s. It uses the typical formula: radical claims, ridiculously broad impact, and a supposed cover up the “the establishment”. Energy is energy. If you heat organic matter you run the risk of denaturing proteins. The microwaves are not ionizing radiation, they can’t alter the molecular composition of molecules. They can, however, add energy to a system and allow for things like denaturing to occur by altering the activation energy. In the case of destroying nutrients in breast milk, it’s obvious that subjecting biological materials to a significant energy source is going to have implications for proteins. You would have the same issue if you heated the milk on a hot stove or over a flame.
As you would expect, millions of years of evolution have produced nutrient compounds that are terribly resilient and are able to retain their natural conformations in the face of high-energy bombardment. As you would guess, our digestive system has also developed systems to largely protect us from harmful protein conformations. I have to say I’m quite disappointed to see links such low-grade pseudo-science on one of my favorite blogs, but hopefully it will help people recognize the kinds of healthcare FUD that litters the blogosphere. Here is a link to an opposing view that I discovered via Google:
http://www.cspinet.org/nah/04_05/microwavemyths.pdf
I’m not offering this link in support of their position exactly, rather I would always prefer to see both sides of an argument in a situation such as this.
July 16th, 2005 at 1:00 am
i read one of those articles a month or two ago and found the science behind the claims very bad, actually. i’m not saying microwave food is wonderful, but there is no real evidence for any of his claims, he relies only on anecdotal and specious argument.
July 16th, 2005 at 2:02 am
I wonder if these dangers are real or not. I mean, in the litigous-happy American society, if the dangers were real, then there would be lawsuits all over against makers of microwave ovens.
July 16th, 2005 at 2:07 am
My immediate reaction after reading the article is that this guy is a nut. That does not, however, discount his points. Most of the events and research that he references sounds quite bogus, like:
“In most cases, the foods used for research analysis were exposed to microwave propagation at an energy potential of 100 kilowatts/cm3/second, to the point considered acceptable for sanitary, normal ingestion.”
There seems to be 3 classes of problems related to microwaves.
1. Microwave irradiation of people is harmful.
Duh! While this may be the case, all modern microwaves have an integrated Faraday cage, and will not operate unless the door is closed. This insures that people are not microwaved – only food.
2. Food is damaged by heating.
This is very true. Many of the vitamins in fruits and vegetables are damaged by cooking. Presumably this is true for a wide variety of foods. This has nothing to do with microwaving food, however – it is the trade off that people make when they heat food in order to kill any bacteria in or on it.
3. Microwaving food in particular dammages food
It sounds like the main credible worry is the creation of isomerically changed molecules.
“Production of unnatural molecules is inevitable. Naturally occurring amino acids have been observed to undergo isomeric changes (changes in shape morphing) as well as transformation into toxic forms, under the impact of microwaves produced in ovens.”
For example, prions are isomerically changed proteins. I have no idea what the resulting concentrations of changed isomers are in microwaved food.
As far as microwaving degrading the quality of food, that is a personal preference, rather than some sort of established fact. All of the different ways to cook foods – frying, deep frying, boiling, baking, steaming, smoking and microwaving (I probably left out a few) – have different effects of food. Different people will perfer different methods of cooking.
July 16th, 2005 at 2:26 am
Well, if you are going to take Dr. Mercola seriously, I wonder if your next posting will be something like ‘Dangers of Vegan diets’? Dr Mercola is a strong proponent of drinking raw milk and eating raw eggs, for example.
That does not mean he is not right on this subject, of course, but his research does very often not concur with research from other scientists. As I am sure you know, it is easy to find scientific ‘evidence’ for EVERYTHING you want to prove. If you want ‘evidence’ that vegetarianism is extremely unhealthy, just visit http://www.westonaprice.org, for example.
July 16th, 2005 at 4:00 am
I’ve long been distrustful of microwaves, having heard things about them, but now I’ve read those I finally understand why they’re bad. Ick, i’m not using a microwave again.
July 16th, 2005 at 10:18 am
I’m still not sure whether microwaves are dangerous or not, but if you are looking to let the micro go, a toaster oven is a nice alternative.
July 16th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
There are several brands of toothpaste that do not contain flouride. They work great. They also don’t contain sugar; you get used to the flavor in about 5 days. I always wondered why toothpaste contains sweeteners… seems to be counter-intuitive.
I am aware of Mercola and I find his science to be somewhat faulty. I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. I think he might be right in his conclusions, sometimes, but the way he arrived at them seems fishy to me too.
July 17th, 2005 at 1:31 am
What a load of bunkum!
From Dr. Mercola – “No FDA or officially released government studies have proven current microwaving usage to be harmful..”
That’s good enough for me, all the rest is conspiracy theories. He’s got a book to sell somewhere no doubt.
After skimming over his website, I thought to myself he’s going to get stuck into vaccinations somewhere here as well.
These are dangerous people, anti-vaccination advocates kill babies.
My 2c on flouride. No flouride = No teeth = Ugly = Lonely = Die much earlier than the 3 hours flouride *may* statistically take off your life.
Avoid Mercola like the plague.
July 17th, 2005 at 7:44 am
I’ve been using non-fluoride tooth paste for years. Every time I go to the dentist, they praise me about how incredible my teeth look. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I am using a toothpaste that isn’t even endorsed by their dental association.
Dr. Mercola may seem like a quack to you, but I strongly believe he is merely ahead of his time, much like many other revolutionaries in history. Time will tell either way, whether his ideas become more popular with more studies to back them up.
Dr. Mercola’s take on veganism/vegetarianism: your ability to thrive on a plant based diet is based on your Metabolic Type. Some people have metabolisms that are genetically predisposed to digest plants better while others are made to digest meats better. Simply take a metabolic type test to determine which part of the sliding scale you are on and then chose what kind of diet to pursue.
If you’d like an alternative to microwaves, I’d suggest toaster ovens. I believe Dr. Mercola also sells a microwave alternative on his website.
July 17th, 2005 at 9:59 am
After working 24 hours straight one day, I put my baked potato in the microwave. The next thing I knew, my food was on fire. I guess I was too tired to notice that my potato was still wrapped in the aluminum foil. Yeah, talking about the danger of using Microwave. But I still love the convenience that Microwave provides. Toast oven is great, but it just takes too long to heat the food.
I also feel that when people start to dig into the nitty gritty chemical components, things tend to get out of the hand and EVERYTHING becomes dangerous in that sense. Try to analyze the way we eat at the camp ground… we probably will never grill another piece of hotdog again…
July 17th, 2005 at 11:12 am
>Jesse Edmunds Says:
>
>If you’d like an alternative to microwaves, I’d suggest toaster ovens. I believe Dr. Mercola >also sells a microwave alternative on his website.
Now isn’t that interesting (grin).
July 17th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
My doctor says that microwave ovens are dangerous because they may turn normal water (H2O) into perhidrol (H2O2) which is very dangerous if ingested.
I don’t know whether this is true or not.
July 17th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Joel D,
I admire your scepticism. Check out this page here for more information about Dr. Mercola:
http://www.mercola.com/forms/background.htm
Quote:
“Mercola.com is not, in other words, a tool to get me a bigger house and car, or to run for Senate. I fund this site, and so am beholden to no advertisers, silent partners or corporate parents. Where I offer or recommend products, I do so because I have actively researched them and find they are the best in that category for your health; I ignore anyone with a lesser product, and products not directly pertinent to your health, no matter how much money they offer me.
And any and all money made from the sale of the products I recommend goes right back into building a better site. A site that, startling as it may be with all the greed-motivated hype out there in health care land, is truly for you.”
Even he himself writes “You are wise to question who you can trust when it comes to maintaining, enhancing or rebuilding your health.”
July 17th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
Interesting: Microwave can influence your wireless network (just as phone, etc.) Maybe later we will find that wireless network is the black beast.
It is also hard to believe and do choice in that world. Especially the good choice (maybe there is multiple one). There is a big tendancy to get vegetarian/vegan, eat bio. It seems to be an hype among a lot of people. Is it the best thing? That is like TOFU/SOY, there is people claiming it is also a conspiracy (http://healingcrow.com/soy/soy.html). What would be their motivation?
It is quite hard for a perfectionnist person like me to take decision (I bet you too sometime!
) and I doubt we all have time to conduct our own study from scratch and understand “everything”. I am learning to do action sometime and accept error. It is part of the process. But the “best practice” ain’t always the “[really] best pratice”.
July 18th, 2005 at 6:43 am
The very idea that microwaves from the sun are save because they are DC whereas microwaves from an oven are unsafe because they are AC is utter bunk. Microwaves do heat things because their frequencies correlate with the rotational frequencies of water, that much he gets right, and that occurs regardless of the source of the microwaves. Microwaves might vary in polarity, but that has literally nothing to do with AC vs. DC.
Also, the infrared spectra of water is very broad. Any radiation in that region will cause water to absorb energy and heat up. Hot spots in milk in a bottle are the result of not stirring. You could do the same thing by heating it with a metal rod touching just one part of the milk. It would seem cool far away from it, but there would be a dangerously hot spot where the rod was. To fix this is easy – shake up the bottle. If it’s still too hot, you heated it for too long. Period. Just like leaving food in the oven for too long.
Can you burn food on a stove? Yes. Can you burn food in an oven? Yes. Burnt food is malformed proteins.
Cooking food on a grill is surely much worse for you than in a microwave. The carcinogens from the smoke permeating the food, the fumes from excessive lighter fluid (which mostly burns off quickly, true), whatever it is that makes charcoal so easy to light – all of that gets into your food. The heat of direct fire touching the food is much higher than you see in ovens (microwave or conventional), and can cause more radical changes to protein structures – it burns the food more.
I’m not a MD. I haven’t studied the biological results of these things. I do have a doctorate in quantum chemistry, though, and I have studied how chemicals absorb radiation. His description of compounds being altered by “frictional” heating applies no matter the source, and isomerization will occur in any cooking process. If you don’t change the structure, you are eating raw food.
That could well be fine, eating raw food. Just don’t deceive yourself into believing that one form of heating is inherently better or worse than another. Look into black body spectra. Cooking food at a lower temperature for longer will cook it more evenly and thoroughly, with fewer incidence of “hot spots”. The source is irrelevant.
July 18th, 2005 at 7:35 am
That “Hidden Hazards” site claims that there is a difference between electromagnetic waves created by AC (microwave) and DC (the sun) sources, which is just plain silly. Assuming that there is a difference between the two, if you took a look at the wiring inside a microwave, you’ll probably find that there is a transformer powering the magnetron, a transformer that switches the power from AC to DC and steps up the voltage. That means you’d be getting his safe “DC” electromagnetic waves in the first place. Finally, a quote: “Artificially produced microwaves, including those in ovens, are produced from alternating current and force a billion or more polarity reversals per second in every food molecule they hit.” The alternating current is running at 60 Hz. You get about 2.45 billion polarity reversals per second because THAT’S THE FREQUENCY OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVE! It has absolutely zero to do with how the wave was generated.
That page also claims that eating microwave food demagnetizes and shorts out connections in the brain, which is crazy on so many levels I wouldn’t even know where to begin. We don’t have magnetic anything in our heads. Nerve impulses are transferred by a well-known sodium-potassium electrochemical reaction.
Here’s a another good one from that page: Biological effects of exposure to microwave radiation causes, and I quote, ‘A breakdown of the human “life-energy field” in those who were exposed to microwave ovens while in operation, with side-effects to the human energy field of increasingly longer duration’. Huh? I’m not aware of any scientifically proven ‘life-energy field’, and anyways, no microwave energy is escaping the oven. So does that mean eating microwave food destroys your aura? Are we killing Gaia with our addiction to microwave popcorn? What is he even talking about? I’d like to see a link back to the study he got that from.
I wouldn’t believe a word on that page, it seems to be pseudo-science crackpot bunk mixed in with a good helping of ‘I heard this happened once somewhere so it must be true’. The science behind how microwaves work is well-understood, and microwave ovens have been used safely for over fifty years now. I’d hate to see you give up your time-saving microwave over this.
On that note, I’ve loved your writing since your Dexterity days, and I’m looking forward to your book. Keep up the good work!
July 18th, 2005 at 8:40 am
Steve, I’m very dissapointed that you posted this. As someone with a strong science background, I can assure you that this is right up there with UFOs and theories about the moon landings being faked.
I have found your articles on motivation interesting, insightful and very valuable. You’re doing yourself a big disservice by posting this sort of thing because it damages your credibility. I feel that would be unfortunate, because it creats a barrier to you continuing to make a positive difference in other people’s lives.
July 18th, 2005 at 9:36 am
Oh man, just don’t withold fluoride from your kids, you’ll majorly screw up their teeth.
July 18th, 2005 at 11:04 am
I can see I’ll need to make a post about fluoride next.
July 18th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Wondering if this post was an attempt to see what sorts of responses you’d get Steve.
July 18th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
Any publicity is good publicity. You should post more articles like this, may improve traffic?
July 18th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
The fact that microwaved food tastes worse than food prepared in conventional oven speaks volumes. Just as fresh vegetables taste better than not-so-fresh vegetables and fresh vegetables are better for you, it would make sense that since microwaved food tastes worse, it has less nutritional value than food prepared in the conventional way.
So, even if eating microwaved foods does not give you cancer, there is still reason to believe that one would be better off not eating microwaved foods. Isn’t that reason enough to stop using a microwave?
July 18th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Mike W – I think the point of the message is that such subjective accounts are fine for personal beliefs but to begin telling people to stop using microwaves based on such loose anecdotal evidence should be avoided.
July 18th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
Mike W., that’s called a “slippery slope” you’re standing on. Taste doesn’t have much to do with nutritional value, as taste is subjective. Quite a few people would say fast food tastes great, but we all know the nutritional value of it.
Certain microwaved food tastes good to me. Popcorn is quite good today. I think the reason people say microwaved food tastes bad is because there isn’t too much food designed for the microwave in mind. You’re probably just reheating leftovers which usually taste bad to begin with.
A lot of food can be baked in a toaster oven or conventional oven, but I suspect “microwave” is added just to sell more product to those who are lazy.
A good deal of taste comes from the texture as well. A microwave does not burn or crisp food the way an oven will. And the microwave does not heat evenly, so your food will have hot/cool spots. That is the biggest problem with microwaving that I see… the uneven heating. Everything else, IMO, is bunk science.
As a cooking tool, a microwave is quite valuable.
July 19th, 2005 at 1:48 am
Will you apply your vegan and no-fluoride habits to your children (and believe these habits are good not only for adults but also for children) or will you wait until they grow and then let them choose what they want? I know, you can reply the same way “will you apply your non-vegan and fluoride habits …”, but it’s all about what to choose: what you think is the best, what scientists think is the best or what most of other people do…I have no problem choosing for myself with all of the possible consequences but it’s hard to choose for somebody who can’t resist (yet
and may suffer from my decision…
July 19th, 2005 at 1:49 am
Steve,
I’m an avid reader of your blog and I admire your writing, but I have to say I’m disappointed that you posted this. Do you base many of your decisions on what to eat and how to live on mumbo-jumbo “research” articles like this? I strongly suggest you stick more to proven, peer-reviewed scientific research than just jumping on the band-waggon of the latest conspiracy-theory nut with a web site.
July 19th, 2005 at 5:39 am
Uh…it’s most certainly possible to burn food in a microwave. My wife was being sarcastic with an ex when he asked how long to cook a hot dog in the microwave, but he thought she was serious. He got a piece of charcoal you could write with.
I personally destroyed a microwave over by warming a hand towel in it for ten minutes when I was a kid.
You can burn anything if you keep adding heat to it.
July 19th, 2005 at 5:58 am
Those looking for fluoride / fluoridated water-related information might want to start here: http://cis.nci.nih.gov/fact/3_15.htm#5
July 19th, 2005 at 6:07 am
Some discussion of Mercola is available here: http://www.randi.org/jr/081304permit.html#11 and here: http://www.randi.org/jr/052303.html including some discussion (and deserved mockery) of his claims that prayer affects water.
Sometimes science and math actually tell us things that are TRUE. There is no need to be scared: http://racross.blogspot.com/2005/06/science-requires-math-blind-belief-is.html
July 19th, 2005 at 10:21 am
Aaron: Uh…I said it does not burn like an oven will. As in, the cooking characteristics are different than an oven. Place the same item on the stove and you will get a different result. Put it on the grill and you will get yet another result. Boil the item, another result. Fry the item, another result, etc.
July 19th, 2005 at 6:55 pm
Accepted. Temperature and temperature gradient both make a difference.
July 20th, 2005 at 9:26 am
Steve, I know you’re getting a lot of flak for this post, but don’t let that deter you. Sometimes to be right, you have to go against the current status quo. Keep it up.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Fluoride is very dangerous to your health. For a wealth of well-documented in depth analysis, please visit http://www.fluoridealert.org. Tom’s of Maine makes several non-fluoridated toothpastes which I have been using for several years.