Do Microwaves Affect The Usefulness Of Food?

Author: Maryam Ayres Time for reading: ~2 minutes Last Updated: August 08, 2022

Do Microwaves Affect The Usefulness Of Food?

Cooking time and the amount of water used are the main factors of any type of heat treatment of food.

Microwave ovens have been part of our daily lives for decades, but there are still concerns about their effect on the quality of the food they cook. We are not worried about the temperature differences with which we can get a finished product, but whether this type of heat treatment does not harm our health.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a consultant for CNN, explains that all methods of heat treatment - baking , boiling , steaming or microwaving - destroy some of the nutritional qualities of the products. The key to good cooking is not to lose too many minerals and vitamins.

Microwave ovens work on the principle of using fluxes of oscillating electromagnetic waves, similar to radio waves. These streams of energy pass through food and excite the molecules that make them up, which in turn releases heat.

Because microwave cooking time is much less than other methods, it loses fewer vitamins, which are broken down by prolonged exposure to high temperatures. More vitamins can be lost during cooking for another reason - due to the higher or lower acidity of the water. This factor is absent in microwave processing.

Vitamins C and B, for example, are water-soluble and are released from food when in contact with water and high temperatures. It is advisable to keep the amount of water to a minimum when cooking in the microwave, and if this is not possible, use this water for other dishes to avoid throwing away useful substances. A typical example is broths - rich in nutrients dissolved in them. Some foods, such as rice, legumes, and pasta, are artificially high in vitamins and minerals, and cooking them — regular or microwave — reduces their usefulness because water washes away parts of the nutrient layers. Such foods are best cooked on steam or in a pressure cooker.

The combination of high temperature and air generally spoils the food, because vitamins A, C, E, K and B oxidize quickly and the nutritional value of vegetables containing them drops significantly. To counteract this effect, it is recommended that the vegetables be cut into large pieces in order to reduce their surface that comes into contact with the air.

In conclusion - each type of food heat treatment has its pros and cons. Microwave cooking requires less water than traditional, but more than using a pressure cooker. This also means that the loss of vitamins in this way of heat treatment is somewhere in the middle between that of the stove or steam. But cooking in the microwave is much faster, which means that far fewer vitamins will be destroyed by the heat itself.

Do Microwaves Affect The Usefulness Of Food?

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