“Microwaves are life savers,” says Laxmi Neupane, a young working woman. “I use micro­wave ovens almost daily. My hus­band and I are both busy. Micro­wave ovens give us the flexibility to prepare quick meals or to heat up the leftovers.” While there may be many fans of microwave ovens in urban cit­ies like Kathmandu, few seem to know the threat to health that they pose. They effectively poison your food.

 

To understand the ‘magic’ microwave ovens work on our food, we need to understand how a microwave oven actu­ally works. Microwaves, as the name suggests, cook food by injecting them with microwaves, a form of energy. Inside the guts of a microwave, a device called magnetron channels electrical energy from a power outlet to a heated filament, creating a flow of electrons that in turn transmits microwaves to the cooking cham­ber through an antenna.

 

Microwaves bounce around in the chamber and cook food by radiation heating—exciting molecules within an object—by becoming lodged in water, sugars, and fats.

 

The harm lies not in the device itself, but mainly in the plastic containers used to heat food. These containers contain two components that health experts are most concerned about: phthalates and bisphenol-A (BPA). The compounds are often referred to as endocrine disrup­tors because of their ability to affect estrogen and testosterone levels in humans.

 

They could also hamper with the development of the brain and reproductive organs in grow­ing foetuses.

 

Some may argue, ‘it’s the food we eat, not the container’. But according to Bhupal Govinda Shrestha, assistant professor at the Department of Biotechnology at Kathmandu University, you should care about the container, too, because after heating, the molecules holding the container vibrate, and loosen, causing some BPA and phthalates to leak into the food. The same with plastic wrappers: they tend to melt (not physically or in a way obvious to the naked eye) and drip, and contaminate the food.

 

The signs on the containers that read ‘microwave proof’ or ‘micro­wave safe’ only indicate that they are going to blow up and set you house on fire while cooking. They offer no guarantee whatsoever of being ‘leakage proof’, which is, if you think long term, is the greater evil.

 

So what should you do? As Shrestha of Kathmandu Universi­ty puts it, “Fire-cooked meals may take a little longer to prepare, but they pose less risk health-wise”.