You are what you eat, but also what you cook, so don’t cook in the microwave

You are what you cook

My jaw dropped — literally — when I checked a recent e-mail message from a prominent alternative health doctor.

It was an advertisement for healthy prepared meals that can be eaten right out of the container or heated in your microwave.

Eating right out of the container? No problem.

But while there are as many opinions as doctors and writers in natural medicine, there are a few absolutes that we all subscribe to. And one is that microwaving your food isn’t natural or healthy.

So why would any doctor recommend this method of destroying — um, that is “cooking” — healthy foods?

Microwave madness

According to a Harvard HEALTHbeat article intended to calm fears about microwave rumors, the FDA is on the job.

Hmmm…the FDA, huh? Suddenly my fears are the OPPOSITE of calmed.

You see, the agency has conducted tests to ensure that only trace amounts of dangerous materials migrate from microwave containers into foods. It’s an involved process that takes into account the ratio of plastic surface area to food, how long a container is likely to be in the microwave oven, how hot the food will get, etc.

What it DOESN’T take into account is the potential cumulative effect of ingesting traces of those materials week after week, month after month, year after year.

The FDA can do all the testing they want — they’ll never convince me that a trace here and a trace there adds up to a trace.

But the trace-toxins issue is just square-one of microwave madness.

Two years ago I told you about a microwave study from Spain. Researchers concluded that foods tended to retain antioxidants better when they were cooked in a microwave.

To say I’m not buying it is putting it mildly.

Quite a bit of previous research has shown just the opposite. In a 2006 study, for instance, beta-carotene (an antioxidant) was significantly depleted in broccoli steamed in a microwave, compared to broccoli boiled by induction.

And that study follows a long history of research that reveals corruption of nutrients when foods are microwaved…

* A 1997 study showed that microwaving of different types of oils, including virgin olive oil, caused the oils to become degraded

* One study showed that microwaving of breast milk depleted antibodies and prompted breakdown of enzymes

* Another study showed breakdown of vitamin B-12 to inactive degradation products

In one Swiss study, researchers sequestered subjects and gave them blood tests after feeding them meals that were either microwaved or conventionally cooked. Results from the microwave group…

* Blood hemoglobin levels decreased significantly (both total levels and the amount contained in each red blood cell)

* White blood cell levels tended to increase for no other reason than foods were microwaved

* LDL cholesterol increased relative to HDL

* Microwaves altered protein molecules

Using the microwave every once in a while may be convenient. But if you are trying to cook healthy foods, there’s no place for radiation — even if Harvard, the FDA and a well-known guru are trying to sell you the same message.

Sources:
“Microwaving food in plastic: Dangerous or not?” Nancy Ferrari, HEALTHbeat, Harvard Health Publications, health.harvard.edu