Animals fed microwaved food fare just as poorly. Scientists at the Federal University of Technology in Nigeria fed two groups of young rats an identical diet including boiled rice and stew, beans, yams and boiled fish — identical except that the food for one group was microwaved for four minutes and then cooled. After three months, all blood parameters were impaired in the rats fed microwaved food. Red blood cells decreased by 12%, white blood cells decreased by 30%, packed cell volume decreased by 25%, and hemoglobin concentration decreased by 19%. Lymphocytes, monocytes, and eosinophils all significantly decreased, while neutrophils significantly increased. This study was published in 2015. In a followup study, published in 2017, rats were fed an identical diet for 42 days that had either not been microwaved, or had been microwaved for 2, 4, or 6 minutes and then cooled. All rats fed microwaved food had significantly lower levels of antioxidant enzymes, Vitamin A and Vitamin E in their blood. The longer their food had been microwaved, the lower the levels of antioxidants and vitamins in the rats’ blood. Another research team, at the University of Lagos, measured antioxidant levels in the brain and liver of rats fed microwaved food for six weeks, with similar results, published in 2014. “It was observed from the result that the activities of antioxidant enzymes decreased drastically (p<0.05) in rats fed the microwaved food as compared to their controls.” A researcher at Koya University in Iraq fed pregnant rats either food cooked in a conventional oven or microwaved food for 18 days and then sacrificed them and examined the pancreas of their embryos. The pancreas of embryos whose mothers had eaten microwaved food showed pathological changes. Pancreatic tissue was damaged, including damage to the β-cells of the islets of Langerhans, which are the cells that produce insulin. And in 2021 still another team of Nigerian researchers, at Crawford University, fed rats for three weeks on rat pellets that had been either unmicrowaved or microwaved for 1 minute and 30 seconds. The rats fed on microwaved pellets had significantly altered levels of total cholesterol, total triglycerides, HDL, LDL, ALP, AST, ALT, total protein, and total and indirect bilirubin, by the third week. And they had significant alterations in their white blood cell count, red blood cell count, hemoglobin, and packed cell volume after just one week. And another team of researchers, at the National University of Medical Sciences in Pakistan, fed adult mice microwaved mice pellets for four weeks and then examined their testes. The mice fed microwaved food had significantly smaller diameter seminiferous tubules and significantly smaller height of the germinal epithelium in their testes. Back in the 1980s I wondered why I would get stomach pain after eating restaurant food, a pain which would last for about 30 minutes. It did not happen every time I went to a restaurant, but only sometimes, and at random. One day, as an experiment, I began a policy of specifying, whenever I ordered food in any restaurant, that I did not want any of it to have been cooked or heated in a microwave oven. From that day until today, I have never had that kind of stomach pain from eating at a restaurant. I have also never, in my life, microwaved any food at home. A microwave oven does not heat your food directly. Instead, it puts electrical energy into your food, which is converted indirectly into heat. Water is a polar molecule, which means it has a positive and a negative pole. An electric field forces any polar molecule to line up in the direction of the electric field. Since a microwave oven operates at a frequency of 2.45 GHz, i.e. 2.45 billion hertz, its effect is to force all the water molecules in your food to line up in the same direction, and to flip back and forth 2.45 billion times per second. The friction from all that motion heats your food. But it doesn’t just heat your food, it puts a type of electrical charge into your food, and if you eat the food right away, that electrical energy is transferred to your stomach, and it can hurt. Clearly there are also long-term effects on the body, since the above studies have found that eating microwaved food has profoundly deleterious effects on your blood and organs. |