I've never seen a radio like that. The only 'brick' I'm familiar with is the old Motorola the military & railroads used. They used transistors and miniature 1.5 volt tubes. They weighed several pounds. It had a handheld microphone on a short coiled cord, and snapped onto the handle of the radio. It would take a very heavy battery to get through an eight hour shift with a six watt unit.
Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of cells. 'Biological Change' is a vague definition.
Yep. Most of the small amount of RF leakage comes out the sides of the oven, around the door seal and hinges. I have several microwave oven leakage detectors. There's next to nothing coming out the front.
That explains my growling stomach. However, it may also have been my cooking, which I suspect is equally as dangerous as RF.
Ummm... cooking is the art of breaking down cellular structures by removing most of the water. Whether the water is removed by microwave or incineration, the results are similar. Oddly, boiling in water, the method of cooking that results in the minimum water loss, also results in the largest vitamin loss, all by dilution because most vitamins are water soluble.
Incidentally, on the vitamin front:
You have somewhere between 10 and 100 trillion cells. You can afford to lose a few.
Dielectric heating.
Chef Jeff.
Obviously, genetics need to play a part in any considerations here, as you say. I didn't know his father, but did know his mother, who went on well into her eighties, and smoked literally 'like a chimney', and it was lung disease which finally got her, as you might imagine. He had several brothers, all older than he was and, although they have died off one by one now mostly, they were all well advanced in years when they went (it's been
20 odd years now since the F-i-L died - actually on my son's birthday). I believe there is one brother still left alive now. So general genetics don't seem to have been a major player for coronary heart disease, in the case of his family, although obviously, it's a complex subject, and quirks of fate in these respects, clearly happen.Interesting though, how closely he seems to parallel you. I wonder if your other radio club members who died, were 'casual' radio users just from a ham perspective, or professionals working around this stuff for 10 hours a day for many years. I wonder if there's any research or collated statistics on this out on the big bad interweb ?
Arfa
It is perfectly possible to 'cook' a cake in a microwave oven. What you can't do, easily, is to produce the external crust, which is a product of water removal and scorching, by direct application of heat to the outside. This is a specialised way of cooking, called baking. In order for it to work, it's a case of carefully balancing the heat and duration of application that's being used, such that it penetrates all the way to the centre of the cake mix, thus cooking it, before it has scorched the outside to the point where it becomes a heat insulator, and stops enough heat penetrating. It is the heat only that cooks the food, and it doesn't matter whether this gets into that food by radiation, convection, steam, blowtorch or whatever. Baking, frying, steaming, griddling, charbroiling, pressure cooking and so on, are all just variations on a theme, producing different nutritional and taste variations. The common theme to them all is heat. Further, many microwave ovens also contain a conventional oven, which can be used in combination with the microwave part. In this type of oven, the cake will be cooked very quickly, and have a crust ...
Not really it doesn't, in terms of the actual process of "cooking" ...
Hmmm. I'm not sure that I would like my bacon to be merely heated, and I'm frankly surprised that you, as an American, like it that way. Everywhere that I've ever eaten breakfast in the U.S., the bacon has needed a chainsaw to get through it, and you had to be careful not to take another diner's eye out with a flying shard when it shattered under your knife and fork ! Don't get me wrong - I actually like it like that ... My wife owns several cafes (that's cafe as in U.K. not U.S.) and we go through a lot of pounds of bacon every day. It is cooked daily, a little in advance, by grilling, and then kept refrigerated. When it is needed, it is quickly microwaved to the correct temperature, before being used in whatever dish it is needed in. This is a good example of the bacon already being fundamentally 'cooked' by the original grilling process, such that the microwave is merely reheating it. Very little additional cooking takes place by the application of the microwaves. You would not tell the difference in the hot product, between it having been reheated, or having just come off the grille.
Arfa
Almost exactly the same story as Jeff (even the triple bypass at 48). Bad choice in parents certainly contributed in my case, but heart problems were not common in the family until my generation: my older sister and I both have had bypass operations, with a low HDL being the main problem for me.
There is always waves leaking out. A little food in the seal will help that. It might be damaging to the eyes if you were looking in, but you would feel heat on an other body parts if it were really high. Thats not common at all. My HeathKit microwave had a conductive plastic outer seal that would be heat damaged from microwaves. I don't thing the HeathKit used the 1/4 wavelength seal common on all todays machines. It used a capacitive seal. I have several leakage detectors, and all microwaves leak.
greg
A fresh kill might be considered live. When I say its dead, is it not dead ? I always like to stir up some thought. I eat meat. Many nutritionists stress eating live plants. Plans food is alive. Would you eat dead plants ? It looks pretty bad. I guess dried is dead, and looks Ok.
greg
Gee, I built that Heathkit 40 years ago. I got used to microwave cooking a few years prior to that at a friends house. In my kitchen I got the gas stove/oven (I prefer electric ovens) One combo turbo/microwave, another microwave, and another turbo oven.
greg
As Spock once said... "Even vegetarians live on death."
More so with plain old cooking (see:
It says on that page
"The presence of nitrosamines may be identified by the Liebermann's reaction"
Er, Jeff ??
I wouldn't. It no longer has blood flowing, or a heart beating.
Once they are picked, they are dead. They get no water or nutrients to continue growing.
You've never used dried onions, or tried banana chips?
Agreed.
Well, it is possible that a career in RF causes so much stress from overwork and company politics that a heart attack is probable. However, that's conjecture.
Mostly casual but there were two broadcast engineers among the mix. One of these died from liver cancer, the other from a nasty virus that literally ate his heart. If you want to get some real RF exposure, there's nothing like working in a broadcast studio (near the xmitter tower), or on a mountain top radio site, or at a military radar station. I had a few years of such exposure back in the 1970's, but mostly, it's been ocassional yacking on VHF/UHF with minimal power. Basically, the sample of local hams that have died is not sufficient to get a decent correlation. The only factoid that're really relevent is that none of them died from coronary issues. Although I have some obvious coronary problems, I expect to meet my end in the supermarket parking lot, run over by some lunatic driving diagonally across the lanes, thinking all the rules of the road are suspended in the parking lot.
Actually, yes. There was a study about 10 years ago attempting to correlate cancers with RF exposure using hams as a population sample. The results indicated that there was a greater probability of contracting leukemia if one was involved in ham radio, than the control group (non-hams). The study was horribly flawed, both in it's data gathering and sampling methods. I'm too lazy to find it.
Other than mess, I don't know of any studies.
45 years ago, when I first got into ham radio, I had a full head of hair, a positive attitude, a steady hand, and a fairly decent bank account. After 45 years of RF exposure, the hear is almost gone, my attitude is very pessimistic, my hand shakes, and my bank account is depleted. Obvious, all this must be caused by RF exposure.
Hmmm... I'm 62 now and had the operation in 2002, so I made it to 54.
I'm not all that convinced that cholesterol and coronary heart disease are directly related. I know of several individuals (including my former GP doctor) who have fairly high cholesterol levels, but no sign of any problems (which included an angiogram just to be sure). In my case, the common thread among the family was high blood pressure. I'm also not sold on the consensus that statins are a good thing. I've had 8 years of continuous aches and pains from the statins and finally decided it was a bad idea.
If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. However, now that I've made it this far, why ruin my decadent and lavish lifestyle.
He was a distant cousin in Germany. Most of his useful work was done in the 1880's. He died just before WWI. It's more correctly the Liebermann?Burchard reaction used to test for the presence of cholesterol and steroids.
Nitrosamines are formed from the heating of sodium nitrite, used for red food coloring. Any kind of heating will cause it's production. However, the "cause" is not the heating. It's the artificial adulterants added to the meat that are the problem. Note that the human body can convert nitited (procarcinogens) into nitrosamin, even if the cooking process does not produce any.
I vaguely recall that barbeque cooking is the worst for nitrosamines, while microwave cooking produces the least.
MICROWAVE COOKING AND FOOD SAFETY
Well, that doesn't detail it, but it's still interesting reading.
Funny how potatoes and onions sprount in the fridg. They may slow down but are not dead. They are officially dead if they dry out or are consumed by mold.
Those are seeds! That's life in them!
I still have my hair, but have followed a similar path. I attribute it to customers that think I should pay them for the privilege of repairing their equipment. Or for the other parasites in my life that thought, "He has some- thing, that I should have instead."
Jeff
Or, consider the "Resurrection fern" (Polypodium polypodioides). Pick it, let it dry out, and it shrivels up, losing up to about 3/4 of their internal moisture during natural dry spells (and up to 95% or more under experimental conditions). The cell walls fold up, it ceases metabilizing... is it dead?
Put it back in water, several years later... and 24 hours later it will have rehydrated itself, turned green, and it's growing healthily once again... is it alive?
Or, for a more common example: take seeds. I've got over a dozen healthy tomato seedlings growing outside, about to be transplanted into the garden. Most of them were started in February, from seeds I saved from a previous generation of open-pollenated tomato plants... back in 1991! They've been in the freezer for almost 20 years, well dried and then frozen... and I got about 80% germination rates for most of the varieties.
Were these seeds alive, or dead? How about the plants which sprouted from them after the seeds were planted?
AFAIK Nitrites are used to *preserve* meats, not just add red color. It then becomes a question of people getting sick or dying from bad meat now, or possibly dying many years later of cancer. Personally I limit the amount of cured meats I eat, but do not avoid it entirely.
I thought the high temperature charring created allegedly cancer causing by-products.
Jerry
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required