alt Hacker NewsDoes anyone knows if using microwaves might possibly affect the nutritional value of the food? Or if radiation can leak and act upon your body if you stand very close to it. Heated plastic doesn’t sound too healthy either. And why do we never see commercials about microwaves?
I know nothing about these things, but I still only use it to heat my cold cup of coffee - and I’m standing way back while I do :) I even own a pyroceram skillet.
Replies
> Does anyone knows if using microwaves might possibly affect the nutritional value of the food?
Cooking in general affects the nutritional value of food—some nutrients are easier to absorb when cooked, so cooking effectively increases their amount, while other nutrients are destroyed [0] [1]. But given that you're probably cooking your food anyways, there's nothing specific to microwaves here.
Microwaves might actually be slightly better than other cooking methods here, since they produce a lower heat that's less likely to destroy nutrients, but the cooking method has such a minor effect that I wouldn't really worry about it either way.
> Or if radiation can leak and affect you body if you stand very close to it while it’s running.
Microwaves are classified as non-ionizing radiation [2], so their main effect is just heating things up. So if you're standing near a microwave and your body starts heating up, then something bad is happening; otherwise, you're probably fine.
The only health risk from microwaves (aside from a hypothetical accident involving someone being cooked inside one like a rotisserie chicken) is cataracts [3]. But this usually only affects radio technicians, who put their heads beside much bigger and much more powerful microwave emitters than a domestic microwave oven. And even cataracts are only due to the heating effect.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking#Effects_on_nutritional...
[1]: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cooking-nutrient-conten...
In general the nutritional value of the food is less affected by microwave cooking, because you can use much lower heating times and it is easy to ensure that the temperature is not too great.
Moreover, at microwaves it is easy to cook without adding water (whenever you are cooking meat or vegetables with high content of water, e.g. potatoes; when not adding water, using a glass vessel covered with a glass lid is normally mandatory), or only by adding a minimum amount of water, which avoids the leaching of water-soluble nutrients.
These properties ensure that food cooked at microwaves in the right way (e.g. without water whenever that is possible) is frequently tastier than when cooked by traditional means. The only exception is for people who like burned food, as this method for degrading food is more difficult to do at microwaves.
While the fact that food is less affected by microwaves than by most other methods of cooking is intuitively obvious, there have been published several research articles where it was investigated the degradation of several essential nutrients, e.g. vitamins, during cooking by various methods, and they confirmed a minimum degradation during microwave cooking, caused by shorter cooking times and lower peak temperatures.
When cooking at microwaves, you normally do not cook everything together, because meat requires different parameters than vegetables and there are 3 or 4 classes of vegetables that require different parameters. So you typically cook the ingredients separately and you mix them after cooking, when you also add ingredients like oil, which should better not be heated.
You can cook multiple classes of vegetables together, if you start with those that require the longest cooking time, and microwave them for the time difference vs. the next class of vegetables, then you add the next vegetables and microwave them for the next time difference, until you add the last kind and microwave again everything for the remaining time.