Вот, кстати, для тех, кому не лень читать на басурманском языке, еще одна заметка.
Prevention wrote:No appliance inspires consumer angst like the microwave oven, says physicist Louis Bloomfield, PhD, author of How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life. He should know: Worried microwave owners regularly deluge the University of Virginia professor with e-mails and letters asking if this household workhorse is really, truly safe.
Their number one fear? That microwave cooking can somehow make us sick, even give us cancer.
They can't, Bloomfield says. Although we associate microwaves with nuclear power (even the dictionary lists microwave as the second definition of nuke), they are generally safe--if you follow operating instructions, keep an eye on children around them, and always have an oven mitt handy.
Like the broiler on conventional stoves, microwave ovens use a type of energy called electromagnetic (EM) radiation to warm your coffee and heat your pizza. Broilers use a form of EM radiation called infrared radiation; microwaves use microwave radiation (hence the name).
While high-energy forms of EM radiation, such as x-rays, can cause cancer, infrared and microwave radiation can't, because they simply don't pack enough power to damage your DNA, explains Gary Zeman, ScD, a certified health physicist in Berkeley, CA, and spokesman for the Health Physics Society. (All electrical devices, including microwaves, do generate slight electromagnetic fields, he notes.
Despite concerns, the National Research Council, after much research, found no link between such fields and cancer.) Nor do microwave cooking make food radioactive, change its protein structure, or contaminate it in any way, Zeman says. Once microwave radiation is absorbed by your leftover meat loaf, it is transformed into heat.
