Food cooked in a microwave oven is unhealthy

July 18, 2007 by abby.

I remember the first microwave oven we got - it was a large, expensive thing with all the bells & whistles - and we used it at almost every meal. It cooked fast and cleanup was easy. That was it’s big selling point at the time.

But about the only thing I use the microwave for these days is warming up a cup of coffee or making popcorn. Never for soups or left-overs or anything that the kids are going to eat.

As I understand it, microwaves heat and cook food by blasting it with microwave radiation. The microwaves enter the food, collide with water molecules, and the resulting friction from moving molecules creates heat, which cooks the food…. or something like that, anyway.

All fine and dandy - if you want your food hot, just blast it with radiation - and ‘Ding’ it is ready to eat.

And then I read about how some school kid had done some experimenting with plants and the water that she gave the plants… it seemed that houseplants that were watered with radiated water didn’t grow very well at all.

It turns out that her experiment and the results as she published them were …umm… less than scientific, and not repeatable in a controlled double-blind study.

But, I was still concerned about the safety of feeding my kids microwaved food, so I kept looking for information. I found that there is quite a bit of information available, most of it bad. Check out this page - Hidden Hazards of Microwave Cooking - it’s a long page with a lot of info, but it’s worth checking out.

The bottom line is that I don’t want my kids eating anything that has been cooked or re-heated in the microwave oven, and I don’t feel too great about all the meals I’ve placed in front of them over the years that may have been unhealthy, if not outright poisonous.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »