Use your Microwave carefully:
Dear Reader,
The label on your favorite food container may say “microwave-safe.” But a shocking new investigation has found there may be no such thing.
Every time we heat up a bowl of soup or last night’s leftovers, we could be getting toxic doses of dangerous chemicals that can lead to everything from heart disease to cancer.
That’s why you need to take three important steps before you use your microwave again.
And this is especially urgent if you’re expecting a baby or preparing food for children.
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From the frying pan into the microwave
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I’m sure if microwave ovens suddenly disappeared, most of us wouldn’t know what to do.
We’ve gotten so used to zapping every kind of dish imaginable — and expecting it to be ready in 15 seconds — that we’d be left eating cold soup and a PB&J sandwich every day!
But if you’re putting your microwaved food in any kind of plastic, you’re most likely getting some nasty extras that you didn’t count on.
Even if that plastic is labeled as being “BPA-free” it can still be leaching dangerous chemicals into your food.
An investigation by Time Magazine found that when over 450 plastic products were analyzed, 70 percent of them tested positive for releasing compounds that had estrogen-like activity.
And when those plastic containers, glasses and plates were subjected to “real-world conditions” like going in the microwave, the number jumped to over 95 percent!
So almost all of them, even the BPA-free ones, were adding chemicals to our food that can wreak absolute havoc on our health.
BPA is part of a group of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors that can do some nasty things to our body’s hormones. And that’s doubly true for babies still in the womb. These toxins actually mimic estrogen, and have been linked to everything from heart and brain damage to breast and prostate cancer. But our children are especially vulnerable.
Last year we found about the epidemic of early puberty in little girls. It’s something that has doubled in the last generation, and is being blamed in large part on the huge amount of estrogen-like chemicals these kids are constantly exposed to.
And then manufacturers tried to pull the wool over our eyes by making a huge deal about ditching BPA in plastics. They even put big stickers on those products saying the BPA was gone — as if that made them perfectly safe.
But it turns out that one of the chemicals it got replaced with, called BPS, is also incredibly dangerous.
When researchers from UCLA exposed zebrafish (which are transparent and easily studied) to a tiny bit of BPS, it caused significant problems in brain development and damage to the reproductive systems of the baby fish.
And it’s not just fish or laboratory rats in which we’ve seen this sort of damage. Almost the same exact health issues, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease and hyperactivity, have been found in babies who were exposed to the chemical before birth.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to be super careful with what you put in the microwave, especially if you’re expecting a little one.
So here are three important tips to help you do that:
Tip #1: Only microwave food in glass or ceramic containers.
Tip #2: If you must cover something never, ever use plastic wrap. Instead, use a piece of paper towel.
Tip #3: Don’t reuse plastic food containers. And especially, never repurpose food or take-out containers for use in the microwave.
To Your Good Health