How Safe Is Your Microwave Oven?
Jean asked me the other day to do some research on the safety of our microwave and I found some startling information.
One of the things we have used our microwave for over the years is to make baked potatoes. I have perfected a way to get really good bakers to cook in a microwave and we have been eating them for years and wanted to share the secret on our Healthy Diet web site. However, after the information I found we will no longer be using our microwave for baked potatoes or much of anything else.
Because of the way microwaves cook food they actually damage it in a way that can be unhealthy. The conventional way of heating food is by convection, transferring heat from the outside of your food to the inside. But, with microwaves the molecules in the food are agitated and vibrate together to produce heat. This results in damage to the molecules in the food, sometimes creating byproducts that are harmful.
And if that isn’t enough to make you stop and think, after reading this article at Mercola.com it might change your mind. The article is about the safety of microwaves and reports on an incident in a hospital where blood was heated in a microwave and it killed the patient. In a transfusion blood is usually warmed because it comes from the refrigerator, but it isn’t warmed in a microwave!
What’s the bottom line? Microwaving changes the molecular structure of the food you eat taking the nutrients out and worse it could produce secondary byproducts that are carcinogenic in nature.
After my research Jean informed me that friends of ours got rid of their microwave years ago for health concerns. I know we won’t be cooking baked potatoes again in the microwave. We made bakers the other night in the oven and they were delicious, better than I had remembered.
Alan LeStourgeon
Tags: microwave ovens, baked potatoes, carcinogen
Stumble it!
Related posts you might be interested in:
