The TRUTH about Microwaves

There seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding the safety of microwaves, and what they're secretly doing to your food when you're not paying attention. We are going to dispel some of the myths and bad science that you’ll frequently hear by people who have little or no real understanding of the basic physics involved in microwave ovens.

Myth: Microwaves use nuclear radiation to heat food!

The Truth: Microwave ovens use micro-waves at specifically set frequencies (somewhere between radio waves and infrared radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, around 2,450 megahertz) to agitate (shake) water molecules in food.

The specific science is that this frequency range has an interesting affect in that the waves are absorbed by water, sugars, and fats. Once absorbed, they’re converted directly into atomic motion – what we call heat.

Microwaves don’t get absorbed by most plastics, glass, or ceramics. Metal reflects microwaves, which is why metal objects don’t work well in a microwave oven and sometimes spark. Microwaves have metal walls to reflect back the microwaves into the interior of the machine, where your food is cooking.

As these water molecules get more and more agitated, they begin to vibrate at the atomic level and produce heat. The head that results is what actually cooks food in your microwave oven.

A conventional oven cooks by the conduction of heat, from the outside of the foot toward the middle, using hot, dry air, evaporating moisture (which is why the outsides of food typically gets brown as you cook it in an oven).

Microwave ovens use the microwaves to excite the water, sugar and fat molecules, so they basically cook each atom at the same time. Now, there are random unevenly thick or dense areas of food that may not cook perfectly uniformly (but this would be the same in a conventional oven).

The way that microwave popcorn bags and those little pizza plates work to crisp food is to use a bit of foil and cardboard so that they become very hot and that dries up those areas of the food, allowing the heat to brown and crisp the food.

Myth: Zapping food in a microwave leaches out key nutrients!

The Truth: If prepared correctly, cooking in the microwave is one of the best ways to retain your food’s
vitamins and minerals.

Essentially, the biggest threat from microwave cooking is that you burn the crap out of your hand, or use the wrong kind of plastics to cook with. Obviously, you wouldn’t use plastics on an oven because they would melt and you could mix your food with chemicals in the plastics. Well, you also need to be sure you’re cooking with microwave-safe plastics so that you don’t gobble up plastic junk. Common sense, people.

Using a microwave with safe plastics is actually near the top of the list, nutritionally, for sound food-

preparation methods. Using a small amount of water to essentially steam your food from the inside will retain more vitamins and minerals than almost any other cooking method.

Examples:

• 1. If you boil spinach on the stove it will lose up to 70% of its folic acid. Microwave it with a little water and you’ll retain nearly ALL of its folic acid.
• 1. Cooking Bacon on a griddle until its crispy creates nitrosamines – which can cause cancer. Cooking the bacon in a microwave creates far fewer of these cancer- promoting chemicals.

Myth: Cooking food in a microwave can make you sick.

The Truth: If prepared with microwave-safe containers, covered tightly, with a minimal amount of liquid, it’s actually more healthy than conventional cooking. In fact, using a microwave to cook can actually enhance the nutrition of some foods.

It makes the carotenoids in tomatoes and carrots more available to our bodies. It makes the biotin in eggs digestible so that our bodies can metabolize it. The intense heat kills bacteria in food that can make us sick.

"Whenever you cook food, you'll have some loss of nutrients," says registered dietician and certified food scientist Catherine Adams Hutt. "The best cooking method for retaining nutrients is one that cooks quickly, exposes food to heat for the smallest amount of time and uses only a minimal amount of liquid."

Summary:

Well, now that we understand how microwaves actually work (by exciting fat, sugar, and water molecules) we see that they aren’t dangerous at all. In fact, they’re more healthy in most cases! So when people start giving you all of their ‘flavor of the month’ Men’s Health arguments, shake your head and laugh manically. They’re idiots, so let them be idiots while you cook your next incredible delight.

• I've got a bunch of BADASS microwave recipes, if you're interested, just leave a comment down below, and please, throw a brother a FOLLOW