Is there any evidence that eating food reheated in a microwave is harmful?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My spouse is trying to convince me that reheating food in a microwave is unhealthy or harmful. Is there any evidence that this is true?

Thanks,
J.

2

Short answer: no, there is no evidence it is harmful to eat food cooked or heated in a microwave.

Long answer: https://legionathletics.com/is-microwaving-food-bad-for-you/

Lots of ads, skip those. Scientific answers and references to more science at the end.

3

However, as @BippityBoppityBoo’s cite mentions, and the following article details, don’t microwave in a plastic container.

The WHO’s guidance is that, while microwaving food is, indeed, generally safe, that you shouldn’t reheat food in a microwave while it is in a plastic container, due to concerns about certain ingredients in plastics that can become “leached” out of the container during microwaving, and may disrupt the body’s hormones.

4

@BippityBoppityBoo 's article is a good one; it’s long, but that’s because it’s thorough, covering the most common claims and nicely explaining the difference between ionizing radiation (which can damage your DNA and increase your risk of cancer) and non-ionizing radiation (which can’t really do anything more than heat stuff up).

Has your spouse presented any evidence to back up their assertion that heating food in a microwave oven is dangerous?

5

Several people would tell you that eating food reheated in the microwave that was made by either my mother or my mother-in-law was harmful to your health. They’d say the same thing no matter how it was cooked or reheated.

6

Yes. My spouse showed me this study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687850717300481

I didn’t really understand the chemistry they describe, but I did have concerns about 1) it was done in albino rats (why albino???), not humans, 2) the N was small, only 8 per arm, 3) the study only judged serum antioxidants. Can anyone with more biological knowledge judge if this study has any validity or not?

Thanks,
J.

7

Instead of comparing with un-heated food, they should have compared the microwaved food with food heated by a conventional oven to the same temperature. There is no way to know if the effects found in the study were caused by the heating or by the microwaves.

The way that the introduction section of the article is written also gives me the impression that the researchers were rather biased going into the study.

As evidence goes, this is pretty weak. At best it is a preliminary type of study that bears further investigation. It doesn’t prove anything.

8

Heating food, regardless of the method used to impart that heat, is known to reduce antoxidant content:

Microwaving wasn’t one of the methods tested at the above link, but several other methods were. To the extent that cooking method matters, it’s about how hot you get the food and for how long.

9

Perhaps more directly of interest:

They found that baking, griddle-cooking and, yes, microwaving produced the lowest losses, while boiling and pressure-cooking were the hardest on antioxidants. Frying was somewhere in between.