Research

My wife left a book about cancer in the bathroom and put a bookmark in a chapter about the dangers of microwaved food, and asked me to read it.

We do have a microwave oven. We don’t make a lot of food in it, but we do frequently heat a cup of tea in it, if the tea pot has gotten too cold.

I read the chapter. It mentioned that a Russian study had found an alarming array of illnesses like cancer that people who used microwave ovens would get. It said that the Soviet Union banned microwaves in 1976 for exactly that reason, even if it was reverted later, when Russia became more westernized. And then it went on in some detail about how microwave ovens change the structure of what is being cooked, so it no longer is suitable for human consumption.

I don’t know if I ever would have just eaten up this information and passed it on. It depends on the subject. On other subjects I have certainly in the past taken information I read in a book or article, or heard from a video, at face value, and passed it on as fact without checking it further.

But at some point along the way I’ve gotten wiser, and more skeptical.

So, in this case, I notice right away that there are no references. A paper presenting the results of a scientific study should have some kind of reference, preferably a name, a date of publication, a list of authors. There was no such thing. To a large degree, probably, because that study doesn’t exist. It is hard to prove a negative, so I can’t be sure of course. But I searched hard, and couldn’t find such a study.

I did find references to Russian studies from the 1970s on the potential negative health effects of microwave radiation. They were based on exposing rats non-stop to rather high doses of radiation. Nothing remotely comparable to turning on a microwave oven in the room a few times per day.

And as to that very specific claim of microwave ovens having been banned in the Soviet Union in 1976, it is repeated over and over by a great many anti-microwave websites. But no trace of any fact of that having happened. On the contrary. People very familiar with the Russian microwave market and regulations at the time are pretty sure there was no such thing.

My wife appreciated that I looked it up.

I shudder a bit at all the stuff we used to accept at face value. I was heavily into conspiracy theories many years ago, and I had a whole bookshelf full of books that pretty much all were written in a similar manner. Piecing together a convincing and alarming story from things one has heard, that somebody wrote somewhere, plus stuff one has guessed, etc.

I do believe quite a few things that are fantastic and that aren’t scientifically proven, or even provable or disprovable, and I’m fine with that. But I just can no longer accept apparent historic or scientific facts that is just something somebody heard, who heard it from somebody else, that maybe somebody discovered it in Russia some time. And if I catch them in one thing passed on as fact which surely isn’t so, it is hard to take the rest of it seriously.