Health expert Dr Xand van Tulleken has said people should be using microwaves as he busts myths around the cooker. Speaking on BBC's Con or Cure Dr Xand addressed questions over whether microwave ovens are safe and whether they reduce the nutritional value of food.
Dr Xand said: "This is a really important myth to bust, and it is a myth. The reason it's important to bust it is because running a microwave is cheap, running your oven or gas stove is expensive. Microwaves are a much cheaper way of heating up food."
He blamed the fear of microwaves on an old movie, adding: "I think it comes from that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Twins, which I loved when I was a kid, and there's a whole scene where they 'nuke' the food'... and it has this sort of association with weird kinds of energy. And there's even stories about microwaves causing cancer and all these sorts of things - using radiation - none of these are true."
Dr Xand said cooking food in a microwave can actually make it better for you. He said: "There's this idea that raw food is somehow more healthy. In fact people are what's called obligate processivores. That's the style of eating we do. So in fact humans, maybe differently to almost any other animal on Earth, we have to process our food.
"We get more nutrition out of it when we cook it, when we ferment it, things like this. So microwaves are a perfectly reasonable part of that. There's a lot of snobbery around them because they're a new relatively modern way of heating food compared to, I don't know, a wood-fired oven or something. But it's a legitimate way of heating food and food is often more nutritious when you cook it."
He added: "It's safe, it's effective and most importantly at the minute it's cheap."
