The microwave oven is one of the “essential” tools in the modern kitchen.
How these dangerous appliances have been allowed is beyond comprehension.
Two Swiss researchers, Blanc and Hertel, confirmed that microwave
cooking significantly changes food nutrients. Hertel previously worked
as a food scientist for several years with one of the major Swiss food
companies. He was fired from his job for questioning procedures in processing food because they denatured it. He got together with Blanc of the Swiss Federal Institute of Biochemistry and the University Institute for Biochemistry.
They studied the effect that microwaved food had on eight individuals, by taking blood samples immediately after eating. They found that after eating microwaved food, hemoglobin levels decreased. “These results show anemic tendencies. The situation became even more pronounced during the second month of the study”.
Who knows what results they would have found if they had studied people who ate microwaved food for a year or more?
The violent change that microwaving causes to the food molecules forms new life forms called radiolytic compounds. These are mutations that are unknown in the natural world. Ordinary cooking also causes the formation of some radiolytic compounds (which is no doubt one reason why it is better to eat plenty of raw food), but microwaving cooking causes a much greater number. This then causes deterioration in your blood and immune system.
Lymphocytes (white blood cells) also showed a more distinct short-term decrease following the intake of microwaved food than after the intake of all the other variants.
Another change was a decrease in the ratio of HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol) values.
Each of these indicators pointed to degeneration!
The results were published in “Search for Health” in the Spring of 1992.
How was this research greeted? A powerful trade organisation, the Swiss
Association of Dealers for Electroapparatuses for Households and
Industry somehow made the President of the Court of Seftigen issue a
`gag order’. Hertel and Blanc were told that if they published their
findings they would face hefty fines or up to one year in prison. In
response to this, Blanc recanted his findings. Hertel, on the other
hand, went on a lecture tour and demanded a jury trial.
FINALLY, in 1998 the Court `Gag Order’ was removed. In a judgment delivered at Strasbourg on 25 August 1998 in the case of Hertel v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights held that there had been a violation of Hertel’s rights in the 1993 decision. The Court decided that the `gag order’ prohibiting him form declaring that microwaved food is dangerous to health was contrary to the right to freedom of expression. In addition, Switzerland was sentenced to pay compensation of F40,000.
(source website)
Also, according to Powerwatch, a non-profit independent organization with a central role in the microwave radiation debate:
“Even when the microwave oven is working correctly, the microwave levels within the kitchen are likely to be significantly higher than those from any nearby cellular phone base-stations. Remember also that microwaves will travel through walls if the microwave oven is against an inside wall.”
How Your Microwave Actually Heats Your Food
Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation—waves of electrical and magnetic energy moving together through space. EM radiation ranges from very high energy (gamma rays and x-rays) on one end of the spectrum to very low energy (radio waves) on the other end of the spectrum.
Microwaves are on the low energy end of the spectrum, second only to radio waves. They have a wavelength of about 4.8 inches—about the width of your head.
Microwaves are generated by something called a magnetron (a term derived from the words “magnet” and “electron”), which is also what enabled airborne radar use during WWII. Hence the early name for microwave ovens: radar ranges.
A magnetron is a tube in which electrons are subjected to both magnetic and electrical fields, producing an electromagnetic field with a microwave frequency of about 2,450 megaHertz (MHz), which is 2.4 gigaHertz (GHz).
Microwaves cause dielectric heating. They bounce around the inside of your oven and are absorbed by the food you put in it. Since water molecules are bipolar, having a positive end and negative end, they rotate rapidly in the alternating electric field. The water molecules in the food vibrate violently at extremely high frequencies—like millions of times per second—creating molecular friction, which heats up the food.
If the food or object place in the microwave had no water it would not be able to have this resonance heating type effect and would remain cool. Or, as investigative journalist William Thomas calls it, “electrical whiplash.”
Structures of the water molecules are torn apart and forcefully deformed. This is different than conventional heating of food, whereby heat is transferred convectionally from the outside, inward. Microwave cooking begins within the molecules where water is present.
Contrary to popular belief, microwaved foods don’t cook “from the inside out.” When thicker foods are cooked, microwaves heat the outer layers, and the inner layers are cooked mostly by the conduction of heat from the hot outer layers, inward.
Since not all areas contain the same amount of water, the heating is uneven.
Additionally, microwaving creates new compounds that are not found in
humans or in nature, called radiolytic compounds. We don’t yet know
what these compounds are doing to your body.
In addition to the violent frictional heat effects, called thermic
effects, there are also athermic effects, which are poorly understood
because they are not as easily measured. It is these athermic effects
that are suspected to be responsible for much of the deformation and
degradation of cells and molecules.
As an example, microwaves are used in the field of gene altering technology to weaken cell membranes. Scientists use microwaves to actually break cells apart. Impaired cells then become easy prey for viruses, fungi and other microorganisms.