Safety of microwave cooking

You're probably more at risk from the hormones and other "enhancements" they put in the food chain than you are from microwave cooking.

Jeff

No.

You are exposed to many times the radiation walking in the sun as you are to *ANY* low output source of EM radiation. Don't like radiation? Stop eating banana's. Stop laying next to your spouse. Both put off radiation.

I guess that separate beds thing has a benefit, after all... :)

As well as heating plastics.

greg

I still use my mothers Corningware set. You can't buy them like that anymore. Glass top and ceramic bottom, with the lips for attaching the handle.

I also have a larger ceramic top and bottom.

If you cook hot dogs, use a ceramic butter tray. Holds one dog. The tray insures even steam heating.

greg

That argument is put forward for gamma irradiation of food, and has some following there. If bombarding me with gamma makes me grow two heads, there is no telling what it will do to food.

However this is different. Yes, microwaves cook by molecularly exciting water, which then heats the food by conduction.

Making water get hot does not release poisons to my knowledge.

However, if there are materials in there that are non-food, and they get overheated, or if you burn your food and create carbon (like when too long on the camp fire) then that is not too healthy to eat.

And equally if the food is unevenly heated, and parts remain still frozen, you can bet that that will cause some stomach upset.

Unless it's about burning food to charcoal, your friend has misheard something and is wrong.

Regarding RF, have irrational phobias by all means if they make you feel better. Sure too much exposure IS harmful, but there are SAR limits that are waaaaay below that. There is also the inverse square law of physics and our logarithmic relationships to sensory stimulus.

Trying to reason with reference to the 'evils of corporate concerns' is frankly a smoke screen to something else that you haven't yet understood, and is not really a sensible starting point to a serious debate about product safety.

Tell your friend to do a little research on the differences between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Also, studying the molecular changes caused by conventional cooking will give many more reasons for baseless fears.

The fact is, humanoids have been on Earth for over 4 million years. The best accepted evidence for the earliest use of fire is 790,000 years ago. I'd say that in the 40,000 generations that humans have been cooking their food we've pretty well adapted to whatever changes cooking causes.

You should also point out to your friend the health problems associated with living in a constant state of fear.

PlainBill

Heating food takes away its qualities for nutrition. Sometime things like potatoes need to be cooked to make it digestable.

Heating food can make it taste damm good. It usually makes eating dead animal meat more tolerable.

greg

Hi!

I believe that is correct, but you can burn food to that point with any sort of cooking device. Burnt food is not good, but I don't know that it will do much harm.

No. The FAQ for this group discusses it further.

That's somewhat true, but one must consider the inverse: a company that kills or injures all of its customers soon doesn't have any! And those that do, whether intentionally or not, get found out at some point.

The last I knew, the effects of this were not fully understood (although they have been researched). It has been shown that there is some reaction (an excitation, if memory serves) of tissue in close proximity to an active cellular telephone or similar device. What this may or may not be doing at the same time is unclear.

I don't do the whole cell phone thing just because of the rudeness factor--and the fact that it's little more than an electronic leash.

I know from having used a communications radio with an earphone that I become really "weirded out" by not hearing ambient sounds clearly out of one ear...so much so that I could not use the radio. So there's that, and there's also my opinion that there isn't a Bluetooth earset in the world that doesn't make one look like a dork.

William

This is true of any process that heats food!

As they are when heated in a regular oven. Or home on the range.

Probably not. Microwave heating (you can't very well call it "cooking") has been around for 60 years. If there were a risk, it probably would have been discovered by now.

I particularly like the way microwave ovens handle bacon.

"Standing in front of a microwave is also highly damaging to your health. Perhaps you have already felt this intuitively? We know that cells explode in the microwave - just fry an egg in your microwave. We are made up of trillions of cells. So work out how many are getting damaged if you stand in front of your microwave for 5-10 minutes."

Pfffft. That was the sound of your credibility going up in smoke.

You obviously don't want to hear it, so I'm not going to waste my time explaining how a microwave oven works.

Jeff

Why can't you call it "cooking" ? If the device changes the structure of the food in some way by the process of heating it, then I would call that cooking. I make scrambled eggs in the microwave. When I take them out, they have changed from raw eggs to cooked eggs, exactly the same as if they had been cooked in a pan ... Canned soup is a different matter. That has already been cooked at the factory, and in that case, the microwave oven does not change the structure any further. It *does* merely heat it.

So, how's that then ? Is your bacon still raw when it comes out ? Merely heated ?

Arfa

This shows a complete non-understanding of how a microwave oven heats food -- or why an egg explodes.

In case anyone is wondering... All microwave ovens have a perforated metal window that reflects microwaves back into the cavity. Virtually no microwave energy leaks out.

This is an interesting one, Adrian. My father-in-law worked for many years for a government wireless department, which included overseas postings. He worked in the proximity of moderately high powered HF transmitters - but not so close to the antenna systems that you would imagine that the radiated RF could be any kind of problem.

Over the years that I knew him, I lost count of the number of his colleagues that literally dropped dead from heart attacks. No warnings. No previously known health problems. Sadly, my father-in-law also finally succumbed to the same fate. He was only in his mid fifties, reasonably trim and fit, didn't drink and didn't smoke. There had been no warnings prior to the event, that anything was wrong. He simply dropped down on the golf course from a massive coronary, and died a few hours later in hospital, after suffering two more.

Rationally, as a person of science and a licensed ham radio operator who has a fairly good working understanding of RF and its dangers, I should be saying that it is pure coincidence, but I've always had this nagging doubt that maybe *prolongued* exposure to even weak field strengths, even at the relatively low frequencies of the HF bands, may do more physiological damage than we believe ...

Arfa

Try making a cake sometime in a microwave, and you'll understand.

Most foods are "cooked" by the external application of heat (either conduction or convection). A microwave oven heats the food directly, which produces rather different results.

The one thing microwaves do very well is to denature protein (that is, coagulate it). This is why scrambled eggs come out okay. It's also the reason your eyes have to be protected from microwaves.

Mostly the latter. I like the way you can easily choose the amount of "doneness", and it's almost impossible to burn the bacon.

It's fairly easy to prove that something is dangerous and unhealthy. It's almost impossible to prove that something is *NOT* dangerous and unhealthy. For example, walking down the road is potentially dangerous because you might stumble and fall. Plenty of slip and fall statistics are available to demonstrate the point. However, just try to prove that walking down the road is perfectly safe. You can't because someone will invariably suggest that this exposes you to various things falling from the sky, sunburn, and automobile attack. There's ALWAYS a way to make something unsafe, thus making it impossible to prove that anything is really *NOT* dangerous and unhealthy.

You might also notice that food safety is a question of degree. Drinking water is safe in reasonable quantity, but drinking too much water is potentially a problem. Same with many foods. Well, that also applies to microwave, barbeque, or nuclear cooking. All of these are safe in small quantities, but if you microwave everything you eat, you're going to have a problem.

That's not a very good description of how a microwave oven works. I'm lazy and don't want to get into that. Suffice to say that you will get the same hard unrecognizable crunchy lump no matter what method you use to heat the food.

I have the same problem with online medicine. The hype is everywhere. My method is similar to yours. If those offering the advice have a financial or political agenda, I ignore it. That means that medical advice from someone selling a procedure, pill, treatment, or religion, is probably biased in some way. The problem is that this doesn't leave much in the way of proper research. Do you trust universities and institutes to get it right when they are funded by the same manufacturers and groups that have a vested interest in producing their favorite result? All that's left is the government, which usually outsources their studies to the same universities and institutes. That essentially leave nobody worth trusting.

Well, please look at this graph:

It's the incidence of new brain and central nervous system cancers between 1975 and 2006 taken in 5 metro areas. Note that it's almost flat. During the same time period, the use of cell phones, BlueGoof headsets, and wireless devices have increased quite dramatically. One would expect to see a rise in the incidence of brain and CNS cancers if the stories are to be believed. Interestingly, I see a decrease in the incidence over most of the time period (mostly caused by improved early diagnosis through PET scans).

As before, it's impossible to prove the Bluetooth, cellular, Wi-Fi, and other forms for personal irradiation are safe. It's easy enough to prove that they're not safe, but somehow, the statistics don't seem to follow.

Incidentally, age has a big effect in braind and CNS cancers. See:

which is the incidence of brain and CNS cancers from 1992 to 2006 by age. Note that the overwhelming number of cancers are in older people starting at about age 59. Interestingly, it's the younger age group that spends all day yacking on the cell phone. If RF caused cancer, one would expect it to show a much higher incidence rate among the heavy users.

Well, you can add one more person to the collection. I didn't drop dead, but came close. In 2002, I narrowly missed having a heart attack by having a triple bypass operation. I've been exposed to all manner of RF for the previous 45 years. I don't drink or smoke. Other than kidney stones, I had no previous maladies. Sounds like a parallel to your father-in-law.

However, we both left out some details. My parents and family have a history of cardiac issues. Those that died a natural death invariably died from a stroke, heart attack, or similar cause. The family also has a history of high blood pressure, which is largely invisible to the casual observer. If I dropped dead today from a stroke or coronary infraction, would you blame my genetics or my exposure to RF?

Moral: Pick you parents wisely.

Yeah, it's something to worry about. Of the approx 8 members of our local radio club that have died in the last 10 years, none died from coronary problems. The cause was usually cancer, emphysema, medical screwups, diabetes, or some nasty disease. Almost everyone had a heart condition, a dictated by todays fairly low blood pressure standards.

You prefer your meat still be alive?

My original question concerned the food however since we're on the subject, it is a well known fact that living tissue undergoes biological changes, even if minute changes when exposed to RF energy. This especially holds true for microwave. Several years ago beat patrolmen used VHF portable radios before they came equipped with external microphones. These kluges were big and heavy, had six watt finals and were nicknamed "bricks". You held them up to the side of your face to communicate. Beat cops used these for years. I believe that it was a city in Connecticut where a high incidence of eye problems were noticed among this group of patients. The only logical common denominator was the RF exposure. Perhaps this is a matter of semantics but getting back to my original comment, aren't "biological changes" the very definition of cancer? Lenny