Investigative journalist investigates the microwave!

Note from Maraline: This is a comprehensive article and well worth the read, however for those who want to cut to the chase, scroll for bold print, and click here to read excerpt Microwave Mania.

 

Cooked
by author William Thomas

How nutritious is microwaved food? In a small town just outside Basel, two Swiss scientists sought some answers to a question as simple as it was contentious. But neither man was prepared for results that would soon prove hotter than the ovens themselves.

The year was 1992. Tests conducted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University Institute for Biochemistry mimicked microwaved food in homes and restaurants in Canada and around the world. Hans Hertel and Bernard Blanc suspected that electromagnetic energy, intense enough to make bacteria glow in their food samples, could alter food chemistry–and the bloodstream of anyone eating microwaved food. But they were stunned to find cholesterol counts up sharply in people eating microwaved vegetables.

Comparing the blood chemistry of people after eating food cooked in conventional and microwave ovens, a dismayed Hertel explained that "blood cholesterol levels are less influenced by cholesterol content of the food than by stress factors." Stressing out vegetables inside a microwave oven, the scientist concluded, ensures that such stresses "can apparently exist in foods which contain virtually no cholesterol."

After taking blood samples from volunteers over a two-month period, Hertel and Blanc found that the nutritional components of all milk and veggies were degraded after being heated in a microwave oven.

So was the blood chemistry of consumers. These abrupt measurable changes included a decrease in high-density lipoprotein (good cholesterol) and a sharp rise in low-density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol) levels following the consumption of microwaved food.

The two researchers also discovered marked declines in the number of red blood cells that carry oxygen to the tissues and collect carbon dioxide, as well as in white blood cells that fight infections. Such significant symptoms of bodily stress "are often signs of pathogenic effects on the living system, such as poisoning and cell damage," the health investigators noted.

For corroboration, Hertel pointed to "extensive scientific literature concerning the hazardous effects of direct microwave radiation on living systems." Noting how gene-splicing geneticists use microwaves to weaken cell membranes, the health detective described how the life-giving electrical charge of cells is neutralized by microwaves. This suppresses natural repair mechanisms, he added, making cells "easy prey for viruses, fungi and other micro-organisms."

Microwave Mania

Bad bugs are everywhere. So are these drastic devices. From restaurants and home kitchens to hospitals and hotel rooms, microwave ovens have infiltrated our lives until most contestants, racing to keep up with runaway technologies, cannot imagine having ever lived without them.

But electricity and magnetism infuse and inform our electro-chemical cells with the pulsating energies of life. Is it wise to repeatedly zap such subtly pervasive forces?

Invisible emissions from microwave ovens often radiate at head level. Aging door seals leak microwaves, while electromagnetic fields (EMF) bypass built-in shielding to irradiate rooms. Before unplugging it forever, EMF radiation specialist Chris Anderson measured emissions from the microwave oven in his Salt Spring Island kitchen streaming through walls in a bedroom nine metres (10 yards) away.

Unlike conventional convection cooking, which heats food from the outside in, microwave ovens heat drinks and dinner from the inside out. High-frequency microwaves starting at around 500 MHz and extending up in the infrared frequencies permeate food, forcing water molecules to heat up by bending them rapidly back and forth.

The result is a fierce electrical whiplash. The Swiss scientists discovered that electrically-charged atoms in the cells bombarded by microwave ovens are forced to reverse their life-giving electrical polarity or "charge" up to 100 billion times a second.

"There are no atoms, molecules or cells of any organic system able to withstand such a violent, destructive power for any extended period of time," Hertel says. This will happen even given the microwave oven’s low power range of milliwatts.

"Structures of molecules are torn apart, molecules are forcefully deformed and thus become impaired in quality."

In fact, this frenetic friction rips food apart at the molecular level, rearranging its chemical composition-and the blood chemistry of anyone munching microwaved meals.

The higher the frequency of electromagnetic fields, the more damage results. Microwaves are near the top of the frequency spectrum. Yet many hospitals continue to collect, freeze and reheat mothers’ milk in microwave ovens!

Malevolent Microbes

Hospital administrators may have missed the April, 1992 issue of Pediatrics Journal, which reported a Stanford study showing that microwaved breast milk loses important vitamins and antibodies needed by infants to fend off malevolent microbes.

The Stanford sleuths further found that microwaving milk increases milk’s acidity, damaging proteins, enlarging fat cells and wiping out the folic acid found to significantly lower the rate of spina-bifida birth defects. Milk heated in a microwave oven and then doused with E. coli bacteria also grew 18 times more bacteria than milk heated in a pan and cultured with E. coli.

Salmonella bacteria may also survive in a microwave’s uneven "cold spots" that do not fully cook food placed inside. Even worse, instead of exuding water, like food cooked in convection ovens, microwaved food cells excrete cancer-enhancing carbon dioxide, hydrogen peroxide and carbon monoxide.

Hertel blew his warning whistle when he saw that alterations in blood chemistry caused by consuming microwaved food mirrored the beginning stages of some cancers. Publishing his findings in the Journal Franz Weber, Hertel bluntly warned that food cooked in microwave ovens causes cancer-type effects in the blood.

Microwave makers boiled over. Reacting like any corporate interest kicked in its profits, the Swiss Association of Manufacturers and Suppliers of Household Appliances quickly brought a civil action against the researchers, demanding that Hertel and Blanc be legally silenced. In a ruling as ironic as it was drastic, a Swiss court prohibited Hertel from publicly "declaring that food prepared in microwave ovens shall be dangerous to health and lead to changes in the blood of consumers, giving reference to pathologic troubles as also indicative for the beginning of a cancerous process."

Faced with a ferocious attack by this powerful trade lobby, Blanc recanted. But the unrepentant Hertel stuck by their findings.

Hertel says his seminars in Germany were "well-received." So was his appeal against corporate censorship. In August, 1998, the earlier ruling was reversed when the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg ruled that the Swiss "gag order" forbidding the Bernese scientist from declaring that microwave ovens pose human health risks contravened Hertel’s right to freedom of expression. The Euro court also ordered Switzerland to pay 40,000 Swiss francs toward Hertel’s legal costs.

Nexus magazine hailed the decisions as "an end to judicial censorship of persons drawing attention to the health hazards of certain products." But in a harried culture addicted to convenience, such unpalatable findings may be hard to swallow.

 

William Thomas is an investigative journalist living on Gabriola Island, BC.