After I looked into the safety issues with freezing in plastic baggies, a friend asked me what I found regarding microwaving in plastic bags, specifically those plastic veggie steaming bags that are jamming the freezer aisle at the grocery store. A popular brand is the Birds Eye Steamfresh, but there are others in the same category. I'm going to pick on Birds Eye here, though, since there is more research out there regarding it.
Here's the word:
Even the most microwave-friendly bags and containers leach a little of those gnarly plasticizers like BPA into your foods when heated, especially when they are in direct contact with fatty foods like meat and cheese.
Even the most microwave-friendly bags and containers leach a little of those gnarly plasticizers like BPA into your foods when heated, especially when they are in direct contact with fatty foods like meat and cheese.
According to Consumer Reports, the Birds Eye Steamfresh bags of green beans were analyzed both before and after microwaving and all samples collected contained very low levels of BPA, about 1ppb or less.
The folks over at Harvard also state that, "When food is wrapped in plastic or placed in a plastic container and microwaved, substances used in manufacturing the plastic (plasticizers) may leak into the food. In particular, fatty foods such as meats and cheeses cause a chemical called diethylhexyl adipate to leach out of the plastic."
In both articles, the emphasis was on how low the levels of BPA were in the samples. Okay. But if a person eats veggies from these bags multiple times a week or month, won't those levels stack in the body? And then what?
I read several heady scientific articles about the metabolizing of BPA and from what I can take away from them, we do process the chemical through our livers and pee it out, but there is solid evidence out there linking BPA exposure to heart disease, obesity and diabetes. This means that even those small amounts of BPA can still cause mayhem as they are passing through your system.
The question you have to ask yourself is how much BPA are you willing to expose yourself to before you are concerned? Canned veggies expose us to the most BPA in the pantry, so if given the option between the two, I'd pick these plastic bagged veggies over canned. But my ultimate preference would be to steam fresh veggies on the stove and skip the microwave altogether. Plus another green advantage to steaming fresh veggies is that there is no plastic bag to toss after the meal. Just saying...
BPA is definitely a concern, but my greatest concern with microwaved food is the radiation left over afterwards as well as the destruction of nutrients and instability caused by this cooking method. If you are eating microwaved foods daily, even if you cooked the food yourself, you are often introducing a rather large host of problems for your body to deal with. My solution: don't bother using the microwave if it can be helped, and certainly don't eat foods that are made (i.e. created in a lab) to be cooked in one.
ReplyDeleteOoh! Agreed. I use the microwave sparingly, with the understanding that whatever I'm heating is going to have reduced nutrition. I love leftover soups because they are so easy to reheat in a pot on the stove, but I'm never quite sure what to do with things like lasagna, since one serving is hardly worth the energy to heat the entire oven to warm it up. Suggestions for single serving reheats that avoid the micro? I'd love to hear them.
DeleteI normally just use the 'grill' function of the oven (I guess that'd be 'broil' in the US? It's been a while. lol) so I don't have to heat the entire oven, and just put whatever it is on the top rack on a baking tray. Takes a bit longer than the microwave but the food always tastes SO much better and is much better for the eater.
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