When I first became pregnant over 10 years ago was when I first started looking into the dangers of microwaves. To be honest I never liked what it did to my food, but now on the brink of motherhood I became even more concerned.
I grew up in a time when “microwave ovens” were the latest, greatest appliance and largely all of our vegetables were cooked inside of one. I can still picture the microwave “safe “bowl that housed our greens for the better part of my upbringing. At that time no one thought about the dangers it conferred to the food inside of it. All we knew was that it cooked food really fast, and heated other food and beverages at lightning speed, even baby bottles! We turned a blind eye to the fact that everything was slightly more rubbery than it should be when it emerged from that newfangled contraption. But what does this “rubbery-ness” mean for our food and our bodies?
Microwaves actually change the cellular structure of the food itself. Conventional heating does so from the outside in. Microwaves work in the opposite fashion, disrupting the cells of the food from the inside out, and therefore altering the food itself. This not only diminished the nutrients we can get from the food, but it actually makes the food harmful to the human body.
In the early 1990s Hans Hertel, a food scientist from Switzerland, performed an experiment in which, keeping all other variables as uniform as possible, he looked at the effects of consuming microwaved food by studying the participants bloodwork. According to Hertel, “The conclusion was clear: microwave cooking changed the nutrients so that changes took place in the participants’ blood; these were not healthy changes but were changes that could cause deterioration in the human systems.” To read more about this experiment please see the following link: https://www.mercola.com/article/microwave/hazards2.htm.
I do understand the appeal and ease of the microwave, so I will tell you what we do instead. To cook AND reheat food, we use the stove or the oven (adding a few drops of water helps with the reheating process). To make popcorn with either use an electric popper or stovetop popper (preferably with organic, non-gmo kernels). If you’re in a bind, and need to use the microwave, definitely do not stand in front of it (there is also a lot of literature out there about leakage of the microwaves). At this point, the only feature we use on our microwave is the timer, and for that, I have to say, it is superb!