Keep Plastic Containers Out of Microwaves

Information coming out of Johns Hopkins University and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center indicates that it is unsafe to use plastic containers or plastic wraps in microwave ovens.

If you need to heat TV dinners or instant ramen noodles or foods that contain fat, you should remove them from their plastic containers and use tempered glass or ceramic containers instead. The heat will release the dioxin in the plastic into your food.

Dioxin is a complex synthetic chemical that is known to be highly toxic to the human body. If the concentration is high enough, dioxin can cause cancer, especially cancer of the breast.

Hot and cold extremes in temperature will release the dioxins. So the suggestion is for you not to use plastic containers for heating food in microwaves or plastic bottles for freezing water in freezers. The dioxins, once released, will mix with the contents and eventually get ingested into the body.

You may have noticed that fast food restaurants have stopped using foam containers and shifted to paper. One reason for that is they wanted to avoid the risk of dioxin. Plastic wrap is similarly dangerous when used to cover foods to be cooked in microwave ovens. The high heat causes the dioxin to melt out of the plastic wrap and drip onto the food.

There has been a lot of research on the effects of dioxin in the environment. The fears have centered on the possibility that dioxins in the environment, especially in the soil and in water, would get into local game and fish. Once these contaminated game and fish are sold and eaten as food, the dioxins would be ingested into human bodies.

However, researchers from the University of Michigan have recently reported that the concentration of dioxin in people eating these foods was not significantly higher than those who did not eat them. The University of Michigan study was the most extensive exposure study yet conducted. It compared dioxin levels in the blood of flood plain residents in Tittabawassee River and the city of Midland.

The study also found that blood levels of dioxin did not increase significantly even among people living on soils that had high levels of dioxin. Being exposed to dioxin contaminants in the soil was not a significant source of dioxin in the blood. Age and body fat levels were found to be more significant in accumulating dioxin in the blood than being exposed to the soil.

It thus seems that you will not get dangerous levels of dioxin from game or fish that you buy in supermarkets. However, it may be more likely to get high dioxin levels if you use plastic containers for heating your food.