Microwaves "Short Out Your Brains"
Actually, conspiracy theorists do most of the brain shorting
Source: Stellar at Freepik (used under Acceptable Use Policy)
A note to my readers: Sometimes probabilities work in our favor, other times they do not. For me these past few days, they have not. As a result of having to engage in several time-critical maintenance efforts, I am posting a heavily updated version of an old article. New content will be coming Saturday if my unlucky streak does not persist!
At least I finally got myself that analog thermostat!
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The 21st century will be marked in the history books as the Epoch of Criminals and Fools. Enabled by the world wide web and an army of bots, immoral people are willing to sell any lie to make a buck. No matter how much a narrative might lack any sense, the ability to blast it out to millions and to repeat evolving versions of it has sent many people down the path of uncritical acceptance. And droves of the gullible have turned a dark-cornered niche into a dominant market force.
Microwave ovens first became a consumer product in the late 1950s, but the technology powering them had been in development since the 1920s. The market size for microwave ovens in the United States varies depending upon the source, but hovers around $3 billion.
Most investor research reports agree that globally it will exceed $20 billion by the early 2030s. Back in 2014, 90% of US households owned at least one; today that percentage may be even higher and among households worldwide it is growing quickly.
Remarkably, conspiracies about microwaves still generate clicks (and dollars) despite that they have been available to the public for almost a century. We live in sad times.
How they work
Microwave ovens use non-ionizing radiation to heat products. A magnetron converts electric energy into microwaves and blasts them into a sealed chamber (where you put the food). Specially designed walls reflect the waves back and forth causing the surface atoms of anything inside to vibrate with ever increasing speed.
The movement creates rising surface heat, which then cooks the interior of the item through convection. It is why the outside of your burrito can be blistering hot while the inside remains cold. Unlike what is told in old wives’ tales (as the expression goes), microwaves do not cook “from the inside out.” Items with liquified centers will be hotter on the inside, but that’s because microwaves excite molecules of liquids more prolifically, so they heat faster or more intensely.
Radiation comes in a variety of manifestations (including mere visible light) and only certain types are inherently dangerous. The non-ionizing radiation used in microwaves operates at lower frequencies than others, such as ultraviolet or x-rays. Low frequency radiation examples are infrared, radio waves, and cell phone range radiation. All of these lack the energy needed to remove electrons from atoms or molecules, which makes them far less dangerous than ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation can still be dangerous, but only through specific modes of exposure.
Different types of electromagnetic radiation (Credit: Spazturtle, CC BY-SA 4.0)
A key factor in the peril posed by radiation is its intensity. Radiation intensity is defined as:
The amount of energy emitted per unit solid angle by per unit area of the radiating surface.
The intensity inside of a running microwave is much higher than what cellphones produce. Nonetheless, exposure to either at high enough levels can cause burning of exposed surfaces (and, if long enough, to the insides of materials subjected to convected heat from that surface exposure). The physics behind non-ionizing radiation prohibits the molecular alteration of materials exposed to it, except in the most extreme circumstances.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enforces several requirements to limit any dangerous leakage of microwave radiation to prevent the possibility of topical burns. One such requirement includes two independent interlock systems to prevent the escape of radiation upon opening the door mid-cooking.
Another is to set the maximum intensity value at which various microwave oven models are allowed to operate. The primary concern with leaked radiation is potential damage to the eyes and testes, as these body parts lack sufficient blood flow to carry off excess heat before it causes damage.
The FDA notes that the overwhelming majority of injuries attributed to microwave ovens are surface burns. Only in vanishingly rare circumstances have more serious radiation injuries occurred, these as a result of very poorly maintained appliances and unusual exposure vectors.
In order to suffer injury beyond severe burning, a person must be exposed to microwave intensities at “orders of magnitude larger than most real-world exposure conditions.” This might occur during military or research applications. The levels of intensity needed to cause such injuries would possess enough energy to cook a bag of microwave popcorn in one-millionth of a second—a power level no commercial microwave comes anywhere close to producing.
Despite the well-understood science behind their operation, some people today still believe microwaves are dangerous to their health. This is because a lot of nefarious actors make money by convincing them.
Demonstration of cooking by radio waves at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, “Century of Progress,” Chicago, Illinois, USA from radio magazine. (public domain)
Junk science for dollars
This belief undoubtedly persists from its pervasive spread by junk science websites and conspiracy theorists. As an example, a website inaptly titled “Health Science Research” makes such claims as:
eating food processed from a microwave oven causes long term, permanent, brain damage by ‘shorting out’ electrical impulses in the brain,
the human body cannot metabolize [break down] the unknown by-products created in microwaved food, or
the prolonged eating of microwaved foods causes cancerous cells to increase in human blood.
These are, of course, all false.
Such sites go far out of the way to support their ludicrous assertions, clearly to sell nonsense products, as conspiracy theorists are wont to do.
The “health science research” website
The claims made on this webpage are so preposterous, it is hard to break them down. Unsurprisingly, the site does not directly explain the methodology behind each of its specific assertions, such as exactly how
continually eating food processed from a microwave oven causes long term, permanent, brain damage by ‘shorting out’ electrical impulses in the brain [de-polarizing or de-magnetizing brain tissue].
Instead, it makes bold claims, then shifts its primary focus to an article authored by Anthony Wayne and Lawrence Newell that seems scientific, but really just meanders from erroneous claims about radiation to Nazi inventors (yeah, that last part is really in there).
Just as the false correlation between autism and vaccines depends upon a single ‘scientific’ paper, so too does microwave oven quackery. Therefore, it is worth examining the article in detail. (The article is on the “health science research” site linked above).
Microwave Quackery — by Anthony Wayne and Lawrence Newell
Wayne and Newell begin with an outright deceptive tactic. They ask, “Why did the Soviet Union ban the use of microwave ovens in 1976?” The implication is that the Soviets knew something about the “danger” of microwaves that others did not, but the premise of the question is false, sort of like asking an innocent person “do you enjoy beating your wife?” The Soviet Union was producing and selling at least three different brands of microwave at that time; they were simply not affordable to most of the population.
These authors attempt to tie the purported ban to a plan to weaponize microwaves against the United States. It is true that in the 1970s the Soviets sent high intensity microwave signals at American embassies in an effort to discern whether this would obstruct communications, but that was an entirely separate program and had nothing at all to do with the development and distribution of the commercial product.
In fact, the lie about a ban seems to have started on the website mercola.com, another conspiracy hive that espouses loads of debunked nonsense with great vigor, including about the COVID vaccine. A brief scan of Russian and Ukrainian websites leads to an abundance of evidence discrediting the ban theory. Many, like this one, make the case by showing plenty of microwave ovens that were for sale in the Soviet Union during the time of the alleged prohibition.
Source: Nevsedoma (Ukraine)
Bad chemistry
Wayne and Newell move on to describing how microwaves work, but creep toward deception in the second sentence. They state, “Microwaves are very short waves of electromagnetic energy.” This is a broad-brush claim that is only accurate depending upon the context.
Compared to radio waves, microwaves are indeed short, measuring 1 mm to 1 m in length while radio waves can be vastly longer, as much as 108 m (100 million m). However, on the next level of the electromagnetic spectrum, infrared, waves measure between 750 nanometers (750 billionths of a meter) to 1 mm—and electromagnetic waves get smaller from there.
Thus, microwaves actually exist in the middle range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is not a profound misdirection, but it indicates the flavor of what’s coming after.
For example, the authors next argue that:
[microwaving food] causes substantial damage to the surrounding molecules, often tearing them apart or forcefully deforming them. The scientific name for this deformation is ‘structural isomerism’.
Structural Isomerism simply describes molecules of the same molecular formula, but with a different arrangement of their atoms. Microwave ovens do not forcefully deform or otherwise destroy the molecules of items cooked in them.
The next paragraph is about radiation and is also plainly false, which makes sense given that that word carries with it a negative connotation to many. The World Health Organization (“WHO”) defines radiation as nothing more than “energy that travels in the form of waves or particles and is part of our everyday environment.” It can be both useful and harmful.
These authors capitalize on the negative feeling associated with the term to state the following:
Radiation causes ionization, which is what occurs when a neutral atom gains or loses electrons. In simpler terms, a microwave oven decays and changes the molecular structure of the food by the process of radiation. Had the manufacturers accurately called them “radiation ovens”, it’s doubtful they would have ever sold one, but that’s exactly what a microwave oven is.
Radiation does not “cause” ionization, rather ionization is merely one kind of radiation. Ionizing radiation is that with enough energy to create ion pairs in atoms. It is typically the result of radioactive decay. Electrons are lost from the atom, which causes the atom to take on a positive charge (as a result of the loss of the negatively charged electron). Niels Bohr had this figured out over a century ago.
Non-ionizing radiation, the kind used by household microwaves, lacks the energy to “change the molecular structure” in spite of what these authors posit, and therefore only vibrates or moves molecules around.
Building on this elementary misunderstanding of chemistry, the authors then contend that “no FDA or officially released government studies have proven current microwaving usage to be harmful,” which is correct. But they then say, “Many of these studies are later proven to be inaccurate.” You can see a whole catalog of studies on the effects of microwave radiation here and judge for yourself. I could not find one that was later deemed “inaccurate” nor did these authors specify one. A notable omission.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
Eggs, mothers, and grandmothers
Nevertheless, to attempt to prove their point, Wayne and Newell deftly change the subject of radiation scholarship to studies about the health effects of eggs. Their apparent implication is that if studies about the health effects of eggs remain debated, studies about the effects of microwaves should too. Curiously, they do not cite a single study in their egg-based discussion. If you are interested in the history of research on the health qualities of eggs, see this review here (it includes an abundance of references).
Without backing up anything they say about egg scholarship, Wayne and Newell again shift attention, this time to “motherly instincts” about microwaves. They state:
Mothers and grandmothers have distrusted the modern ‘inside out’ cooking [of microwave ovens].
While applauding the validity of this alleged instinct, the authors then say:
Even though [moms and grandmothers] didn’t know the scientific, technical, or health reasons why, [they] just knew that microwave ovens were not good based on how foods tasted when they were cooked in them.
I concede that Wayne and Newell are correct in pointing out that the hypothetical mother(s) at issue here did not know the technical aspects of microwaving food—it is, after all, not cooked “inside out.” But still speaking whimsically, if the taste of an item determined its safety, Coke would be viewed by many as extremely healthy (it most certainly is not) and Asparagus as unhealthy (also decidedly untrue).
Clinging to the mom theme for a moment longer, the authors go on to cite public warnings about microwaved breast milk and baby formula, released in 1989—thirty-four years ago. The public service announcement they quote mostly cautions against the temperature of the liquid, with one line dedicated to the “loss of some vitamins” as a result of heating. No molecular alteration to be found.
Most food and beverage items lose some nutrients as a result of heating because vitamins and minerals are sensitive to heat and light. The current CDC guideline on microwaving breastmilk or formula is exclusively about monitoring the temperature and safely storing it.
Wayne and Newell then begin a section wherein they defer to Dr. Lita Lee, who states that “fake milk” (baby formula) is “toxic,” and is even more so when microwaved. Curiously, Dr. Lee’s publications in peer-reviewed journals no longer seem to exist—if they ever did—but her alleged work is still cited across a vast array of conspiracy sites.
That said, I did find one study published in 2016 in the International Journal of PharmTech Research titled, Adverse Effects of Microwaves, written by someone else, but I could find no source validating its conclusion nor has it been cited in any other article about the specific negative effects it discusses. In other words, its validity on the subject is doubtful.
That lawsuit does not say what they say it says
The next section of Wayne and Newell’s article carries the subtitle, “Microwaved blood kills patient.” It refers to a lawsuit in Oklahoma where the hospital warmed the patient’s soon-to-be-transfused blood prior to the procedure, and the patient subsequently died during the procedure. The authors here conclude:
[it is] very apparent that there’s much more to ‘heating’ with microwaves than we’ve been led to believe. Blood for transfusions is routinely warmed, but not in microwave ovens. In the case of Mrs. Levitt, the microwaving altered the blood and it killed her.
The case they are talking about is Warner v. Hillcrest Medical Center, 914 P. 2d 1060 - Okla: Court of Appeals, 4th Div. 1995. (This is an appeal, but contains the full record).
Hillcrest argued that the patient died from a blood clot, while the plaintiffs claimed the “negligent introduction” of the blood into the patient’s blood stream killed her. Of particular interest in the case is the deposition testimony given by the expert witnesses.
Not long prior to the incident (which occurred in 1991) that sparked this lawsuit, health authorities prohibited warming blood or other hospital fluids in microwaves. The testimony does not explicitly state why, rather it only hints at the same issue that arises with microwaving breast milk—the fluid is not uniformly warmed and thus creates potentially dangerous “hot spots.”
Nowhere in the long procedural history of this case is it asserted, by either the plaintiffs or defendants, that the blood itself was “altered” in any way but thermally. Again, authors Wayne and Newell are either intentionally misleading their readers or did not read this very long case. You, however, can read it here.
Like the cheese of the same name, the Swiss clinical study is littered with holes.
The Swiss clinical study
Opening this section, Wayne and Newell cite a study by a Dr. Hans Ulrich Hertel, who they claim was “fired from his job for questioning certain [food] processing procedures.” I could not find Hertel’s full study published anywhere, but one commenter on another conspiracy theory site articulated its problems:
[Hertel’s study] forms the basis of most anti [microwave] articles... Unfortunately it’s an appalling study. Just 8 subjects – including himself – of whom 7 were on macrobiotic vegetarian diets although no consideration was made for any lactose intolerance or chronic anaemia both of which are more common in this subject type, no blinds or double blinds (they all knew what they were eating), no controls due to multiple factors (raw vs cooked vegetables, raw vs pasteurised milk, frozen vs fresh, organic vs standard) before even introducing the [microwave] factor, results were commented on before concluding, no peer review, not published in a reputable journal. Basically so poor that it should never, ever be cited.
His colleague, Bernard Blanc, resigned because he was not involved in the conclusions which were not supported by the results. And 40 years later, we have not suffered a mass extinction as he suggested.
The comment is corroborated by Wayne and Newell’s article. They note it was a study with just eight participants—eight people is not a worthy sample size for just about any type of study—and they do mention Bernard Blanc. Moreover, at least some of the text of the study is available in a subsequent court case, Hertel v. Switzerland (59/1997/843/1049), available here.
The linked lawsuit was Hertel’s appeal of a case brought by the Swiss Association of Manufacturers and Suppliers of Household Electrical Appliances, that essentially asserted a claim of libel against Hertel and Blanc. The plaintiff argued:
Blanc and Hertel’s experiments on the harmfulness of food heated by microwaves and their interpretations of them were not conducted and described according to scientifically recognised criteria. They are of no scientific value; the conclusions drawn from them as to the alleged harmfulness of food cooked by microwaves have no verifiable basis and are unsustainable.
The lower courts found in favor of the Swiss Association. Hertel received a reversal on appeal and was granted damages based on an injunction that forbade him from further publicizing his results. Nevertheless, the dissent properly noted that “In the present case, it is beyond doubt that the applicant’s central assertion and the alleged scientific results do not stand up to close scrutiny.”
The majority agreed, but it overturned the lower court on legal issues related to libel law, not the veracity of the claims. In sum, Hertel’s experiment was garbage, yet Wayne, Newell, and other anti-microwave people continue to cite it as evidence. This is a common tactic of conspiracy theorists—find a sciency sounding article that has been thoroughly debunk, and routinely cite to to it as if it is valid evidence.
Finally, for good measure, Wayne and Newell posit that Nazis invented the microwave (they did not). I started to grapple with this, but decided never mind. This claim is made up for effect, an additional emotional manipulation. It isn’t worth analyzing.
The Epoch of Criminals and Fools
The conclusion is simple—people are not dying from some side effect of microwaves. Hundreds of millions of people have been using them for half a century, and no negative mass effect has been noticed or recorded. Until COVID, the life expectancy of the global population largely trended upwards. If radiation from microwaves and cellphones and other ubiquitous devices were so harmful, it would have been readily apparent long before now.
As I explained in my “chemtrails” article, the purpose for propagating these ridiculous myths is because it is a moneymaking machine. A small number of people utterly lacking in moral principles continue to prey upon the fears, hatred, conspiracy mindedness, or plain ignorance of certain people to profit from them financially, and often politically. It is perhaps the greatest harm possible in a society where this drivel can be heaped upon the masses so efficiently through modern technological connectivity.
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I am the executive director of the EALS Global Foundation. You can find me at the Evidence Files Medium page for essays on law, politics, and history; follow the Evidence Files Facebook for regular updates, or Buy me A Coffee if you wish to support my work.
