Nuking your food - microwaves wreak destruction
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One of the most "overlooked" health hazards may be nuking your food - throwing those tv dinners into the microwave just for a minute - for convenience sake, but watch out - you may be poisoning yourself. At the very least, you will be eating inferior food.
It's a question of frequency, actually. Traditional sources of cooking heat use waves of infrared frequency to heat food, either directly as in grilling or broiling, or indirectly, where the fire heats a pot and the pot, by direct contact, heats the food. This mostly indirect heat, but also the infrared waves of your grill or open wood fire treat the food gently. What we believe is heat, a more or less agitated "shaking" of the molecules, is induced in a slow but time-tested way.
Microwaves are different. They cannot heat up all materials. Their violent bursts of vibration in the longer microwave frequency band can only heat certain molecules, water being one of them. In fact, while infrared waves induce a "shaking" motion, microwaves actually scramble our food, they induce rotation! So no indirect heating is possible, because hard materials resist rotation of their molecules. Your pot or plate stay cold. All a microwave oven can do is scramble your food. It's violent thrashing motion tears at the molecules while heating them.
A question comes to mind: Are we running a large-scale human experiment to find the health effects of microwave cooking? Maybe not, maybe we're just being nuked. You decide - here is a good article on the Nexus Magazine site - The Hidden Hazards of Microwave Cooking - and perhaps the most complete account of what may be wrong with nuking your food can be found here.
What got me going on this was this week's HSI Baltimore e-alert, which follows here:
This week in the HSI e-Alert
In a recent New Yorker magazine I saw a cartoon that gave me a chuckle. A woman was removing a plate of food from a microwave oven while calling into the living room, "Come and get it while the molecules are still vibrating!"
It's an amusing cartoon, but it also serves as a reminder that microwaved food is not quite the same as food cooked with a conventional heating source. And that's a concern for an HSI member named Deloris who starts off a thread titled "Microwave Ovens" with a reference to an item she received from natural medical physician, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Deloris writes: "I've been using one for over 25 years, as I imagine many folks have. If he's right then its only my vitamins and supplements that have kept me alive as I've lost a lot of nutrition in reheated food, not to mention possibility of getting cancer. Any comments on this subject?"
ARE there! Deloris' question has prompted almost 50 responses so far. And no surprise, given how common microwave usage is. Dr. Mercola's article is just one of several he's written about microwaves, and the information he covers can be generally summed up with this comment from HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., that appeared in the e-Alert "Micro Management" (1/27/03):
"What studies exist are all bad news for microwaving - they universally describe some type of damage. One study showed breakdown of vitamin B-12 to inactive degradation products in microwaved foods. There's also a problem with release of potentially toxic molecules into the food from packaging designed to help brown food during microwaving. This includes items such as pizza, French fries, waffles, popcorn and breaded fish."
These unsettling details about microwaves generally go from bad to worse. A member named Brenda says that a source she trusts states that "microwaving food makes vitamins and minerals useless in every food tested and reduces the bioavalibility of many nutrients. It also renders meat proteins worthless."
But the effect of microwaves on food is only part of the problem. As a member named Bob points out: "One feature overlooked about Microwaves (Radar ovens) is that they all leak around the door edges. Measuring with a Gauss meter, every microwave I tested leaked, and was detectable up to six feet away. Microwaves cause the body cells to heat up slightly, and whether this is dangerous or not is not yet known. If you insist on using your microwave, please always move at least six feet away while it is running."
And as you might expect, this conversation eventually comes around to the subject of microwaving popcorn. A member named Liz offers this age-old technique for those who may have forgotten
or those who may have grown up knowing only the microwave variety of popcorn: "When I was a kid (before the days of microwaves or air poppers) my mom would heat a little oil or butter in the bottom of a pan on the stove, add the popcorn, put a lid on it, and shake the pan across the burner. Soon the popping would start and we would have popcorn that the salt would stick to. You have to keep the pan moving so the popcorn doesn't scorch."
And to that a member named Mari offers this pan-popping tip: "Coconut oil for popcorn--the only way to go--the best!"
The "Microwave Ovens" thread covers a wide range of topics related to cooking and nutrition and is a must-read for anyone who's ever suspected that microwaving just might not be the healthiest way to cook.
Posted at December 12, 2003 09:46 PM
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Let me share a message with you, which I wrote today. It was to a friend in the UK, and is part of an exchange that grew out of this post on microwave ovens.
Hi John,
you name three interesting items - tobacco, epidemics and hallucinogens.
If we look at what's really dangerous in this world, those don't figure very high on the scale.
We have chemical pollution from motors: first lead in gasoline, now benzene in "green" gasoline and platinum from catalytic converters, fossil fuels are being held on to and continue to pollute. Then there's other pollution galore, including radioactive uranium being used in ton quantities and spread over the territory of other nations, for now Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and mercury and other poisons being dumped at sea, now coming back to us in the fish we eat.
We also get electromagnetic pollution, mainly in the microwave range, such as radar, TV transmission, mobile telephones, and of course the microwave ovens. Other electromagnetic hazards include extra low frequency waves used for inducing certain states of mind. There's also high energy heating of the ionosphere - the HAARP program.
Medicine is another source of danger, with vaccinations that weaken our immune system, drugs that kill and maim, radiation to "burn the cancer" and so on, while alternatives are actively pursued and suppressed.
Food isn't much better. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, genetic modification, loss of vital elements. Sweeteners that are definitely dangerous - Aspartame is a case in point. Close to the food chain, we have our teeth, filled with a toxic mixture of mercury and other metals, released when we chew our food.
So what do we hear in the mainstream media about these things? Absolutely nothing. Instead we hear about the supposed dangers of tabacco, of epidemics and of drugs, all of them less damaging than the things I just listed, but well promoted in the media, while the real problems don't get so much as a tiny mention.
The reason why education doesn't seem to work with some of these problems, and prohibition doesn't seem to work either, is that they are FALSE PROBLEMS. The real ones are well hidden in plain sight, just that no media attention is given to them. Orwell had it down pretty well. Yes granted, if you look at the news, these three seem to be the major problems that beset humanity, but our problem is that news reporting and media comment is hopelessly skewed towards an agenda and has little to do with the real facts.
Kind regards
Josef
Previous message by John:
Thanks Josef I certainly agree with
and the longer we refuse to confront the reality of things, the worse the situation gets
Everyone, myself included, tends to hear what they want to hear. If someone says it is alright to do X and you want to do X, then you do it. It is so hard to go against the trend, especially if those around you want you to do X, you want to do it, and yet you know it will make you ill. If you refuse, then you may stay healthy, but lose your friends and maybe even your family. It could be argued that good health is useless if you are alone and considered a hypochondriac and a recluse.
One can try and educate people about the Xs that are harmful, but this doesn't seem to be working with things like tobacco, epidemics and hallucinogens. Prohibition doesn't seem to work either.
--
Sincerely, John
Previous message from Josef:
. . .
Well - about that flu epidemic - one could almost say that we're being poisoned by so many chemicals that our bodies barely stay functional. We need to start looking at what we're doing, technologically, not in a way that automatically suppresses "bad news" such as adverse health effects. They can only be covered up so long - and the longer we refuse to confront the reality of things, the worse the situation gets.
The original response by John, to my post:
I have heard this one too. It looks like full circle. I don't know whether you remember Pearson and Shaw's "Life Extension" in the 1980s -- they touted microwaves as the best form of cooking as they didn't wash out vitamins from vegetables. -- all nicely referenced and so on.
The latest thing seems to be an electric steamer, with a bright red button with the world "vitamin" on it. They are touted in mail order catalogues. I must say that I am curious to see what the "vitamin" button actually does as far as the electrical circuit is concerned.
Here we are in the middle of a flu epidemic with estimates ranging between 5 to seven strains, with the medical profession telling suffers to "pop" into surgeries for treatment, with some being given chest x-rays and bronchoscopies at hospitals. There are many people around who seem to have been suffering from flu or flu like symptoms for weeks and months on end.
I wonder why!
--
Sincerely, John
Posted by: Josef on December 14, 2003 07:09 PM
A comment received from a friend in Canada:
...we banned the Microwave Oven approximately over 15 years ago.
The problem we found was that the micro waves create such an intense turbulence in the molecule structure of the product, that the natural information (DNA) is scrambled, and our body is not able to read it anymore. This means, when you put a glass of milk into the microwave, your body is already informed (through your thought form) that you are getting ready for the glass of milk. When you drink the warmed milk, your body systems are ready to consume the milk .... unfortunately, because the information is destroyed in the process, the body can not identify the milk anymore. The result is that the body has to deal with an "unknown" substance, which has to be digested "UNKNOWINGLY".
Meaning, the milk will be "consumed" without the right information (or instruction).
My reply:
I was able to avoid ever buying a microwave oven.
There was always some information around about microwaves possibly being dangerous, and in the 80's, high power microwaves from peak power radar and from communications and TV signal transmission were found (by a German researcher) to be largely responsible for forests dying. Although this was officially blamed on "acid rain", microwaves fit the bill better, because the majority of trees dying were located in the path of such high power microwave emissions.
Later, we extended microwave technology to mobile telephone applications, which are equally damaging. As with the trees dying, damage from mobile phone relay masts and from handsets is being denied by industry, although much research points to dangers for living organisms.
Posted by: Josef on December 13, 2003 03:54 PM
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