Is it Unhealthy to Stand in Front of a Microwave While it is Cooking? - Big Questions (Ep. 7)

Hi, I'm Craig. My socks give off dangerous levels of microwave radiation, and this is Mental Floss on YouTube

Today I'm going to answer mystifying card magic's big question. Is it unhealthy to stand in front of a microwave while it is cooking

The answer is no. Good show, guys. Good job. Everybody. I'm going to take a nap

We here at Mental Floss are detail-oriented, so I'm going to give you a longer answer than just one word, because they're making me

So anyone who saw American Hustle knows the dangers of the science oven, but many people

think microwave ovens, aka microwaves, can cause more damage than starting fires and freaking

Jennifer Lawrence out. A lot of people believe that standing in front of a cooking microwave might even cause cancer

In order to understand why people think that, I'm going to have to explain a little about how microwaves actually work

So your microwave heats up food using microwave radiation. These waves get absorbed by water molecules

These water molecules start to vibrate, and that's what heats up your food

And that's what burns my tongue when I have left over pizza. I should just eat it cold

It's the radiation that freaks people out. But in the US, microwaves are designed and regulated so that barely any radiation escapes

If you look at your microwave, you'll notice a layer of mesh between the glass and the food

That metal mesh makes it so that radiation is contained within the microwave

Very, very small amounts of radiation can still escape from the microwave, but most experts agree that it impossible that they would give you cancer So why did people still believe this Well many experts blame a study done by Dr Hans Hurdle of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology or Swiffitt It was published in 1992

with the shocking statement that participants who ate microwave food got less nutrients. Even more worrisome

Hurdle found changes in the blood which appear to indicate the initial stage of a pathological

process such as occurs at the start of a cancerous condition. Scary stuff, right? But less so

when you find out that there were only eight participants in the study, and they were all men. And one of those men was Dr. Hurdle himself

Plus, his methods were generally looked down upon by the scientific community. No one bothered to replicate his study

Poor hurdle. Poor Dr. Hurdle. We need a lot of hurdles to overcome

So we're going to take the FDA's word on this one. They have claimed, There are no established adverse health effects, including cancer

from using or standing in front of a standard microwave oven. But they still recommend not standing in front of it while it's cooking for long periods of time

Better safe than sorry. I don't even recommend standing. At all. Fun fact

The first item ever microwaved other than the chocolate bar that melted in inventor Percy Spencer's

pocket, which I still would have eaten, was popcorn. Then they tried an egg, which ended up egg exploding all over a fellow egg experimenter

Boy, did he have egg on his face and body. Boiling hot egg, which I also still would have eaten

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