Microwave Ovens – Are They Good Or Bad For You?

Invented in the mid-1940s, but not available for domestic use for another 20 years, the microwave oven has now been a standard feature of household kitchens for decades.

These days, over 90% of homes in both the UK and USA have at least one of these devices, but sales are declining.

Why?

Because people are beginning to question whether they are healthy or safe.

This article looks at the common benefits of a microwave oven, and then examines the reasons why some people have concerns.

Benefits Of Microwave Ovens

These include:

1. Convenience. It’s really easy to throw food in the microwave when you’re busy.
2. Fewer Burns. While you still have to be careful, most people burn or scald themselves less than they would with other forms of cooking.
3. Harder To Leave On. With a conventional stove, it’s possible (and maybe even relatively easy) to leave it on by mistake. A microwave, with its timer, makes this harder to do, although having said that, my first wife set the wrong time (55 instead of 5 minutes) and it more or less destroyed the oven and turned the food to white hot ashes. 🙂
4. Less Clean-Up. A lot of what you make in a microwave is a form of one-pot cooking, which leads to an easier and quicker clean-up.
5. No Need To Preheat. Unlike conventional ovens that need preheating in most situations, a microwave starts cooking as soon as you turn it on.
6. Nutrient Retention. When you boil vegetables in a pan of water, many of the nutrients end up in the water, so unless you use that water for something else (e.g. vegetable stock), you are losing many of the benefits. On the other hand, cooking vegetables in a microwave uses much less water, so it’s more like steaming the food from the inside out, which people say retains more of the nutrients.
7. Speed. In most cases, food will cook a lot more quickly in a microwave than it would be using other cooking methods.
8. Versatility. With a bit of creativity, you can do a lot more in your microwave than you might think. Yes, there are some limitations, but with the features present in modern ovens compared to the early models, there’s not a lot you can’t do. For example, back in the 1980s, using a somewhat primitive microwave, I regularly used to bake bread (from scratch).

Potential Downsides To Microwaving Your Food

Let’s look at the other side of the coin:

1. Education. When you make meals from scratch, your children can learn from this process. Contrast this to putting a prepared meal in the microwave, which leads children to not appreciate the value of fresh food and farming.

   I once met somebody who was in their 20s and who had grown up not realizing you could make your own soup – because all the soup they’d ever had at home had come out of a can.

2. Fast Food Temptation. When you use a microwave, it’s all too easy when you’re at the store to buy ready-made convenience meals, which are typically nowhere near as healthy for you as making your own food using fresh ingredients.
3. Heart Health. A recent study confirmed that microwave-frequency radiation can adversely affect your heart rate. This may be of particular concern if you have some form of heart disease already.
4. Nutrient Loss. In contrast to the benefit described above about nutrient retention, others claim that while the nutrients may all still be present, but their chemical structure can be altered because of the type of heat.

   This means those nutrients will no longer offer the same benefits. For example, it’s estimated that 97% of all nutrients are lost when microwaving vegetables such as broccoli.

   This is one reason why it’s recommended you should never reheat breast milk in a microwave – it’s full of nutrients that you definitely do not want destroyed, and using it to heat up breast milk can kill half of those vital nutrients.

5. Radiation. No matter how high-quality your microwave oven is, it is estimated that they all leak some level of radiation, which is, of course, not good for humans (or our pets). Some say microwaves can cause cancer, while others state this is a myth, and that any radiation that does leak out (because the oven is not a perfect Faraday cage) is too low to cause cancer, or any other problems.
6. Relationship Building. There is something special about you and your partner working together in the kitchen to put a meal together for the two of your (or even your family or for a dinner party) which you rarely have the opportunity to do with a microwave meal.
7. Space. In spite of their versatility and compactness, they still take up space on your counter that could be better used for other things.
8. Taste. Speed sometimes comes at a cost, and that cost can be taste. The fact is, food that is cooked more slowly gives the different flavours time to infuse and mingle better, leading to a more complex and tasty dish.
9. Toxins. Many microwave cooking containers are made of materials that can leach toxins into your food. This may be less of a concern these days since people are more cautious about some plastics (e.g. those that contain BPA), but it’s still a potential issue.
10. Uneven Cooking. A microwave oven, even when it has a turntable (as many do these days), can cook food unevenly, leading to a mix of hot spots and cold spots. The cold spots are a potential issue because that may mean any bacteria present in the food may not have been heated to a high enough temperature to kill them.
11. Various Ailments. Microwaves have been linked to several problems, including dizziness, headaches, nausea, headaches, and a temporary loss of vision.

Conclusion

For me, the benefits of a microwave are far outweighed by the downsides, especially the loss of nutrients.

I have actually reduced my usage of my microwave, but that’s not because of safety concerns but because I’m tending to eat other types of food more than I used to (e.g. salads or oven-roasted vegetables). And the taste aspect is irrelevant to me since I’ve suffered from anosmia for well over a decade now.