by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
This term always leads people to believe that microwave cooking actually is done by nuclear radiation and many thus believe that the microwave is bad for you.
However, cooking in a microwave oven is done by radio waves in the millimeter range which are very hot but are not nuclear radiation despite the often used unfortunate term.
Many lies and scare stories abound, especially now with the Internet, about the dangers of microwave ovens and one lie is being perpetuated time and again and that is the story about the Soviet Union, when Russia still was called thus, having banned the use of microwave ovens in the country. This is, as indicated, a blatant lie as no such order or law was ever issued in the USSR or anywhere else for that matter.
I am always at a loss why people perpetuate such myths and outright lies. They must have some hidden agenda for doing so. Which one it is I do not know.
Nutritional scientists all over the world regarding microwave cooking as (1) safe and (2) as better for some foods than conventional cooking even.
The difference between ordinary cooking and cooking in the microwave oven (microwave stands for the radio frequency that it employs to heat stuff) that food cooks from the inside out, mostly, rather than from the outside in.
The radio waves agitate the water molecules and others in the food placed into the microwave oven and this agitation sets a vast amount of hear free. The microwave radio waves, in themselves, are not hot and whoever, I am afraid to say, claims different has got no idea or is deliberately scaremongering.
Microwave radio frequencies are often referred to as microwave radiation and it is, I guess, for that reason that people believe it to be radiation as in nuclear radiation.
A radio is called a radio why? Because that word has its origin in radiation, namely because electromagnetic wave length is radiation in one way or another. Sometimes radio operators used to talk about the radiation patterns of the high frequency spectrum and so on. But no one would see the radio waves as nuclear radiation and microwave is no different that other radio frequencies, only in a much higher spectrum.
Having said that, we do not know as to, though it does not seem all that likely really, radio transmissions per se over the last century or so may not actually be responsible for the increase in cancers. However, bad nutrition is the more likely cause and pollution, I would guess.
So, just to sum it up once more, you are not using nuclear radiation when heating or cooking food in the microwave and the scaremongers who say otherwise better find themselves another hobby and get a life.
© 2013
