Over 90% of American homes have a microwave oven, but are they safe to use – and what about radioactive nastiness? Well, let’s find out.

First of all, most people have no idea how their microwave works, and most people don’t care. So let me try and explain the process to you in really plain-English.

Your microwave oven uses electricity to generate a radiating “wave” which is sent through the food, just like a special kind of sound wave, yelling loudly at your food as it spins around.
This particular wave is at an incredibly high frequency (typically 2.4 GHz) so you can’t hear it, but it affects the molecules in your food (the tiny bits that your food is made of).

Like lots of little magnets, the incredibly tiny molecules in your food have built in positive and negatives at each end.
This is great, because the microwave’s radiating “scream” acts like another really big magnet beaming through the food. This makes the little molecules spin around almost 5 billion times each second trying to follow this “magnetic” wave.

It’s a little bit like waving a huge magnet over a pile of tiny paper-clips 5 billion times every second.
This constant spinning around causes friction – just like rubbing your hands together really fast. God knows I’d get hot too if I spun around at that speed. Soon enough you end up with piping hot food.

But how safe are these magical machines? Should you be standing next to it while it’s “screaming” at your poor defenceless pudding? Well believe it or not, you’re actually quite safe – as long as your microwave’s casing is containing all those busy little waves properly.

If for some reason your microwave is operating with it’s door open then there is a potential health risk to be conscious of. As with food, microwaves can cause burns and cataracts to the eyes if you’re exposed to a high amount of them. Though realistically you’ll be able to feel an invisible heat coming from your microwave oven which should alert you that something’s not right.

When the door’s closed, your food is in a special kind of cage which prevents these pesky microwaves from getting out (known as a Faraday cage).
The door has a window for viewing, but the window has a layer of conductive mesh in front of it. This mesh allows light to get out, but the wavelength of the microwaves make these waves too large to leak through this mesh, so they bounce back inside. Each wave is actually about 5 inches wide – but boy do they move fast!

Also, don’t worry about getting cancer from any radiation leaking from your microwave.
This is because the radiation produced by a microwave oven is “non-ionizing”, which basically means it’s not powerful enough to split the atoms or change DNA within your body.
This means it can’t cause cancer like the (evil?) “Ionizing” radiation from x-rays or ultraviolet light.

So what does it all mean? Well, in short: Relax! Household microwave ovens, with properly functioning cooking chambers and working doors are perfectly safe. There have been no proven or plausible claims of any adverse effects on health.

With that in mind, go microwave something!