Microwave Oven Radiation and Safety
and how it will effect our health
The microwave safety has been occasionally questioned more in the past rather than now but there are still individuals out there who think that microwave ovens can pose a radiation danger and are a cancer risk but the truth of the matter is that they either base these beliefs on hearsay or incredibly old research.
People generally tend to fear what they don’t understand, and as far as most are concerned microwave ovens are still somewhat of a mystery in regards to how or why they work, and the answer is rather simple and easy to understand once you have access to it.
The way microwave ovens heat or cook food is through the use of microwave oven radiation, now the word radiation usually comes with a heavy baggage usually being associated with the word nuclear, but this is nothing of the sort, we get bombarded with radiation from the sun all day long, radio waves are a sort of radiation and so on and so forth.
So the microwave energy is produced by a component called the magnetron and it is then fed into the oven’s cavity where it heats or cooks food by causing the water molecules in the food to vibrate extremely fast.
Vibration gives birth to friction and friction produces heat with in turn cooks or heats up your food, it’s basically the same process that our ancestor used to create fire from rubbing two sticks together, the only difference now is that we have better sticks.
Now the problem is whether or not microwave ovens leak some of their energy to the outside and it is true that in some cases they might, if you’re dealing with old or faulty door seals there can theoretically be a small amount of radiation leakage, but there’s a small amount of radiation leaking through the viewing glass as well and measurements have shown this to be quite insignificant.
Let’s not forget that microwave ovens are designed for one purpose and that is to enclose the microwave energy so that it heats up your food in record time, energy leaks would be quite unwanted.
The fact is that even if let’s say there would be a leak of microwave energy from your oven, the power of microwave oven radiation decreases extremely quick as you increase the distance from the oven, meaning that the farther away you are from the microwave the less radiation you’ll be exposed to. In fact at only one meter distance there will be practically no radiation left because it dissipates so fast.
There is also the important fact that microwaves, as their name implies are very short wave pulses of energy, they’re about five inches long and only survive for a split second once they’re generated by the magnetron.
Also going back to the radiation issue, there are two forms of radiation there’s ionizing radiation which can indeed damage organic molecules and then there’s non-ionizing radiation which does not damage molecules. Microwaves are part of the second category and they do not cause the food to become irradiated, they only cause it to heat up.
It is also worth mentioning the fact that technology has advanced considerably in the past decades and we now have access to better materials than we did all those years ago, hence today’s microwave ovens are much safer than they were twenty years ago, and keep in mind they were pretty safe back then as well.
Microwave safety tips on how to avoid microwave oven radiation
There’s been some research done by those who repair microwave ovens and the research shows that over half of the microwave ovens which are two years or older leak around ten percent more radiation than the FDA recommended amount. This may seem to be bad news but the truth is that with just a minor readjustment this problem can be solved without much hassle so if you have a microwave oven that’s two years or older make sure that you have it serviced to check for this problem.
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