You often get mesmerized by mouthwatering dishes on your favorite TV shows and in your costly ‘Recipe Book’ with vivid colored photographs that really make your salivary glands to work instantly! With the list of ingredients and a note of cooking method, it becomes difficult for you to wait and you soon start cooking it in the microwave. Oh, the Microwave? You might be master operating this bonny electronic device but do you know what it exactly does ‘inside’ it?
You must get fully acquainted with the microwave cooking before it proves that you had committed mistake. Let us quickly understand the basics of the device. It is a form of electromagnetic energy exactly like what we have light-waves and radio-waves. It occupies a part of the electromagnetic spectrum of power or energy. Microwave is also used to relay long distance telecommunicating, TV programs and other computer information across the globe or to the satellite in the space. Now, the waves of the microwave energy are continuously moving above and below a horizontal baseline. The half cycle below the baseline has negative values and the other tone carries the positive. This results in like a magnet flipping back and forth as it rapidly changes its negative and positive values.
Now what health has to do with it? Yes it does have. Look at the baby food; studies suggest that the milk loses its important Vitamins if cooked in the microwave. In expressed breastmilk, if cooked in microwave, loses some protective properties. One of the most important things to know here is microwave heats the thing from inside out and not like in our normal cooking that heats first outer layer and then gets inside. This is troublesome for the baby as oftentimes it is seen that the mother takes off the bottle from the microwave, touches it, feels it just lukewarm and just gets it to the baby. She forgot about that ‘inside out’ matter that has made milk much hotter than she could ever imagine burning baby’s tongue, throat and lips.
There is something that the physicians and hematologists would take a serious note of is the number of leucocytes (protective cells of the body) drastically increases after eating microwave foods as this is often a sign of highly harmful effects as they observe in poisoning. In addition to that, two researchers namely Hertel and Balnc had observed that microwave cooking markedly changes the food nutrients and the Vitamins and proteins your body looks for gets nothing when it finds microwave cooked food. Furthermore, after eating microwave food, the hemoglobin levels in the blood decreases and the results show anemic tendencies.
Heating itself brings lots of changes in the food but microwave is many steps ahead of normal cooking. Ordinary cooking forms some radiolytic compounds (that is why eating thoroughly washed raw foods are recommended and getting popular) but one of the most violent change microwave causes to the food molecules is it forms new radiolytic compounds that are more toxic as compared to the food that is normally cooked. Such radiolytic components can cause deterioration in the blood and immune system. Some of unofficial studies reveal that microwaved plastic wrap reaches 10,000,000 times FDA limits of Carcinogens!
The conclusion is you can use microwave oven but not regularly. It is okay if you are in hurry (though all the time you are in!); you can use it but for babies and ill people do not use it. Dark green leafy vegetables are to be eaten raw (make delicious salads) and are never to be cooked in the microwave.
Using the microwave might cut-off the time as of now but can also cut-off few days or probably few months from your lifespan too!
