“Microwave Ovens Will Kill You” — An Internet Hoax!
I am blessed to have a friend who is a scientist, a university professor, and a Bible believing Christian, a brother in Jesus Christ who I can trust! His name is John Gideon Hartnett. On the evening of July 26, 2016, I read a post on Facebook warning of the dangers of consuming microwaved food. This is something I have heard about for years now and have believed. But because the article said that even drinking microwaved water is bad for you, I started to have doubts. The study of inorganic chemistry was my favorite subject in high school. I could see no scientific reasoning how microwaving water could possibly change it into something bad. It merely heats it. So decided to take the matter to my friend Dr. Hartnett and this is what he said:
It is not bad. There is no difference to boiling with a flame. It is plain crazy. The wavelength of the radiation is about 10 cm so that is the minimum length scale it could slice and dice. Water molecules are very small and are just heated by absorbing the radiation but as water not as molecules. The real safety concern is leakage. You don’t want them leaking when you are standing there.
In other words, Dr. John G. Hartnett rejects the notion that eating food warmed or cooked in a microwave is bad.
My friends, it’s been a long journey for me to find the truth about issues and avoiding sidetracks such as flat earth theory. I used to regularly visit alternate news sites only to find out later that a lot of what I was reading is trash! I learned I can’t even trust alternate media, let alone mainstream media. I’ve been guilty of forwarding false information and am now trying to be more discerning. The lesson for me is to check out the story and confirm it with reliable sources. The most trustworthy sources for me are individules who I know are believers in the Word of God, the Bible.
Below is the first part of,
Debunking An Internet Hoax: What Science Really Says About Microwave Ovens, Your Food And Your Health
by Tom Venuto
“Microwave ovens will kill you!” Or so they say… If you’ve ever surfed the internet for information on health and nutrition, there’s little doubt you’ve come across scare stories about microwave ovens. Online natural health “experts” claim that microwaves will “zap” your food, deplete it of important nutrients and alter its molecular structure in dangerous ways. They also warn that microwave exposure and eating food cooked in microwave ovens will cause harm to your body and even cause cancer!
Is there any truth to any of these reports? Why are some people so paranoid about an appliance that has been used safely by millions of people for decades? Should you stop using a microwave oven for reheating leftovers, making frozen dinners or cooking your vegetables, potatoes, meat, oatmeal or other foods?
These are important questions because: A) your health is your number one priority and B) the microwave oven, while it may not replace a conventional oven and certainly doesn’t produce better tasting food, is unquestionably one of the greatest time savers and conveniences you can have in your kitchen.
You’re not only about to get the answers, this also will be the last article about the microwave controversy you’ll ever have to read because it demolishes the microwave myths with undeniable proof: facts, science and evidence… not urban legends and fear mongering.
What started all the internet scare stories?
Rumors are often started and circulated on the internet without anyone ever confirming the source. Did you ever get one of those random emails that said something like, “10 reasons to throw out your microwave” and then forward it right on to a friend, just assuming it was true? (go ahead, fess up).
A large part of all the microwave alarmism today can be traced back to a single story that was spread on the internet until it went viral and was eventually accepted as factual. It’s the story of the infamous “Swiss research” done by “food researcher” Hans Hertel, who allegedly performed his own private study to see how microwaved foods affected the results of blood tests. A typical iteration of the story goes like this:
“The use of microwave ovens in cooking can alter the structure of nutriments in foods, making it difficult for the organism to make use of them. Hertel discovered that food cooked or thawed in a microwave oven could cause changes in the blood, indicating that a process of illness is developing. SIMILAR CHANGES ARE ALSO FOUND IN THE CASE OF CANCER.”
As with most alarmist nutrition nonsense on the net, this one also involves the ubiquitous conspiracy theory. The story continues:
“The best studies about the use of microwaves to heat food were purposely kept from consumers. Hertel was efficiently “gagged” by Swiss microwave oven producers. For over 10 years, Hertel has fought for the right to tell the world what he’d discovered.”
Actually the best studies are NOT kept from consumers, they are peer reviewed, replicated and published in scientific journals where we can actually look them up. Alas, we cannot access Hertel’s “research” to judge its validity because it was never published.
In fact, by Hertel and his follower’s own accounts, this “study” was just himself, Bernard Blanc (who later recanted) and six of their buddies who locked themselves in a hotel room and conducted a personal and arguably non-scientific and non-controlled experiment. This is not real research; it was never verified or replicated by other researchers. Yet you see Hertel quoted in almost every “microwaves equal death” article on the Internet, a good tipoff that everything else in the article is suspect as well.
Microwave ovens, radiation and the cancer scare
One tactic used by microwave scaremongers is to instill fears about radiation and cancer. When people hear the word radiation, they tend to freak out. I suspect that even people who understand that we’re not talking about a nuclear accident, gamma rays or x rays still have an uncomfortable feeling about “radiation” cooking their food (after all, we call it “nuking” right?)
But when we talk about microwave “radiation” we are simply talking about production of thermal energy, aka, heat. Radiation and radioactive are NOT the same thing. Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D. from the Harvard Health Review explains:
“Microwaves do not cause cancer. They’re a form of non-ionizing radiation and thus cannot ionize tissue. Microwave ovens use low-frequency waves of electrical and magnetic energy to produce heat to cook food. They don’t make food radioactive, nor do they trigger cancer-causing genetic mutations.”
A search of the medical literature brings up absolutely nothing linking microwave cooking to cancer.
The research says that concern over cancer causing compounds such as heterocyclic amines (HCAs), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), would be better directed toward educating consumers on the charring and blackening that occurs when grilling or barbecuing muscle meats, rather than cooking the meat in microwave ovens.
In fact, cooking in a microwave can actually REDUCE the formation of HCAs. This quote comes from the National Cancer Institute (www.cancer.gov):
“Studies have shown that microwaving meat prior to cooking helps to decrease mutagens by removing the precursors. Meats that were microwaved for 2 minutes prior to cooking had a 90-percent decrease in HCA content.”
Read the rest from http://www.burnthefatblog.com/archives/2011/07/what-science-really-says-about-microwave-ovens.php
