Microwaves, Nazis, Cults, John F Kennedy, Anti-Semites and Christian Fundamentalists

— Or cooking a dinner in 3 minutes flat

By David Vernon

For more years than I can remember, some relatives of whom I am very fond, have been attempting to wean me from my addiction to cooking with microwave technology.  Their concerns are for all the right reasons.  That is, my health will suffer if I continue to heat my drinking chocolate in the microwave.  All the nutrients in my food will be destroyed by microwave cookery, and I suppose, by inference, my overweight 90 kg body will fade to a mere skeleton or I shall come down with terminal cancer.

Recently, I was handed a photocopied treatise that ‘demonstrated’ that microwaving was bad for my health and that I should ‘stop it at once’ — although whether or not I would go blind was not expressed.   I decided to research the claims made in the treatise, and using this newly gained knowledge, either give up my microwave habit completely, or continue with my culinary techniques.

Much to my surprise, my research led me down some very murky trails, including into the cesspit of American and European anti-Semitism, JFK conspiracy theories and Christian fundamentalism.   Places that I normally avoid like the plague.

The Treatise

Health Freedom Resources

Public Awareness Bulletin #1

12 June 2000

This excellent article was written by Anthony Wayne and Lawrence Newell.  Reprinted with the permission of The Christian Law Institute.

Radiation Ovens

The Proven Dangers of Microwaves

Is it possible that millions of people are ignorantly sacrificing their health in exchange for the convenience of microwave ovens?  Why did the Soviet Union banned the use of Microwave ovens in 1976?  Who invented microwave ovens, and why?  The answers to these questions may shock you into throwing your microwave oven into the trash.

So started the ten-page treatise that would wean me off microwave cookery. 

The version of Public Awareness Announcement #1 (henceforth PAA1) that I had been given had been written in Courier font and appeared to have been photocopied several times.  Page numbers were written in by hand.   It was therefore unclear whether this was a document that had been transmitted via the Internet (where much pseudo-scientific material resides these days) or whether it had been typed and retyped and handed on.  If it were an Internet publication then I would be able to find some ‘context’ regarding the authors and publishers and this would help identify their approach to the subject.

A search on the Internet found at least fifty sites hosting the exact treatise or a very close copy of it.   Not all had the heading ‘Health Freedom Resources’ but all had the tagline that this very important document was written by Anthony Wayne and Lawrence Newell.

‘Health Freedom Resources’

My first task was to find out about ‘Health Freedom Resources.’  What type of organization was it?  Did it have any scientific credibility?  

Health Freedom Resources Inc, based in Florida, USA, appears to be a organization run by a gentleman called Rod Radstrom who sells herbs, homeopathic remedies, alternative-medical technologies etc.  As a ‘free’ service to its members and customers, it provides an:

“on going series of informative articles aimed at helping you improve your life and the lives of others…the articles we will select are intended to point out to our public where the ‘land mines’ are located and where the taped path really lies towards a harmony with life and nature on all its dynamics.”

Among the fifty-seven Public Awareness Announcements (PAA) on offer were:

•#2 — Fluoride – Cure or curse

•#3 — Aspartame kills

•#8 — Aluminium metal poison

•#13  — Mom cures child by eliminating milk (one assumes not human milk!)

•#14 — Dangers of vaccination

•#15 — The olive oil scandal

•#23 — Bad MDs and Gun Control

•#57 — Children’s vaccination warning.

Not wanting to destroy three major deciduous forests in downloading all the PAAs, I chose one (PAA23) which seemed particularly incongruous.   PAA23 compares the number of accidental deaths caused by physicians (apparently 120,000pa) with the number of accidental deaths caused by gun owners (apparently 1,500pa).  By dividing the number of deaths by physicians and by gun owners, Ron Radstrom states that “Statistically, doctors are approximately 9000 times more dangerous to one’s health and life than gun owners.”  He concludes his article with:

“Please alert your friends and family to this alarming threat.  We must boycott the services of allopathic physicians before this gets out of hand.  Fact is, ‘Guns don’t kill people, conventional medicine does!’ “

Without checking Ron’s statistics, there are two simple points to be made.   Firstly, how many deaths are deliberately caused by physicians (negligible) and compare this to how many deaths are deliberately caused by guns (28,663)?   Secondly, if you had colon cancer, would you go to a physician for help, or a gun owner?

Discovering the nature of “Health Freedom Resources” did not condemn the authors of PAA1 however.  More research was required.

The Christian (Common) Law Institute and Anthony Wayne

According to Ron, PAA1 was reprinted with permission of the Christian Law Institute.  A search on Google failed to identify such an institution.  However, it did identify a Christian Common Law Institute run by Anthony Wayne (one of the authors of PAA1) among others.   The Christian Common Law Institute is hosted by Lawgiver.org

Lawgiver.org’s purpose according to its ‘privacy statement’ is as follows:

“The Lawgiver.org network represents an ecclesia - ekklesia - of Good and Lawful Christian Men and Women assembled in the Liberty of Fellowship and Freedom solely in and of Our Sovereign Lord and Savior Jesus, the Christ. This electronic means of bringing His Gospel to all the world, including all the material posted herein, is an exclusive Domain of and in Christ Jesus as declared by His Authority as absolute Sovereign King of Kings. All Internet pages on the Lawgiver.org network are private Ecclesiastic material reserved for the exclusive use and viewing of those who are of the Tree of Life.”

Furthermore:

“The Lawgiver.org network is not a religious organization, not-for-profit corporation, IRS 501(c)3 tax exempt status, or any other artificial or fictional organization or entity; nor are we subject to any commercial laws, the UCC, codes, statutes, administrative rules, UCMJ, martial law, or any other purported regulations and laws that are not founded of the Tree of Life. We are responsible and answerable only to the Laws of God, the Lex Ecclesia Domini.”

Finally:

“We are not in any way associated with, nor do we approve of, any non-Christian, non-ecclesiatic, fascist, or racist group using the the Name of Christ Jesus as a means for their promotion of non-Biblical and anti-Christian beliefs and ideals.”

What this actually means is hard to ascertain, but some quotes from news articles on the website highlight the views of those who run Lawgiver.org.

On women:

“To find a masculine president, one has to go back to Ronald Reagan. Before that, however, the vast majority of U.S. presidents, Republican and Democrat, exuded masculinity and manliness. Those days are over. Today, women must be appeased and catered to. They are the heads of businesses, the heads of churches, and the heads of their homes. In politics, the women's vote is usually the one that turns the election. Women serve on military ships and in military operations. They dictate their children's upbringing (which explains why most of them grow up undisciplined and spoiled, by the way) and have the final word on virtually all family decisions. Such a phenomenon is the sign of a nation in trouble. God's prophet warned that one of the marks of a nation under divine judgment is when "women rule over them." (Isa. 3:12)”

On the American Civil War:

“The alleged civil war was a war between the southern Christian Constitutional Republic of America and the northern foreign commerce merchants (mostly British) who supported the central government and their military as an enforcement tool of their desires.”

On social security:

“The Social Security systems also plays an important role in sealing the fate of a people … Social Security is both a Corban which Jesus warned against [see Mark 7:11] and a corvee system of statutory labor [not unlike that slavery in Egypt] where by a portion of your sweat, blood and tears becomes the property of the State in return for the security and protection of that exclusive corporate society.”

I could find no biography of Anthony Wayne on the site, but I was able to find a link to another one of his research reports entitled JFK vs the Federal Reserve.  This six page paper clearly identifies Anthony Wayne as the author.  In summary, it explains that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by assassins employed by the United States Federal Reserve Bank.   An afterthought to the paper (possibly not written by Anthony Wayne) concludes (in the author’s own words/spelling and punctuation):

“This is the real reason for the JFK assassination! All the other reasons are the jew/banker controlled CIA/Secret Service mis-direction propaganda… These jew bankers have robbed White Christian Americans of TRILLIONS since at least 1913 ! Do you think they would hesitate to assassinate the U.S. President or anybody, or any amount of people, or do whatever they had to, to keep this GIANT scam going ??? …Because of this jew banking system, they have financed ever war in the last century, & have killed over 100,000,000 White Christians world wide ! Spread this e-mail to everyone you know & look it up for yourself… Stop believing the jew controlled media. Follow the Scriptures, & search for the truth in everything.”

Just because Anthony Wayne writes conspiracy theories and may have colleagues who write grammatically bizarre anti-semitic material, does not mean that his arguments within PAA1 are incorrect.  That leads us to our next stop, an examination of ‘selected’ facts within PAA1.

How microwave ovens work

Microwave ovens work by firing non-ionising radiation at food.  The radiation used is called non-ionising radiation because it does not detach charged particles from atoms and hence produce radioactive elements.  Microwaves are found in the electromagnetic spectrum between radio waves and visible light.   Microwaves used in ovens are electromagnetic waves with a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz or 2,450,000,000 cycles per second.  When a microwave hits a water molecule the polarity of the water molecule is reversed.  Hence as a stream of microwaves hit a molecule, it twists back and forth some 2.45 billion times per second.  This twisting causes friction.  Friction causes heat and the neighbouring non-water molecules to warm up via convection.  Hence, unlike ‘conventional’ ovens where the food is warmed up from the outside and relies on convection to transfer the heat to the inside of the food, a microwave (depending on the consistency of the food) heats the food reasonably well throughout.

The effects of microwaving food

Now according to PAA1 microwaving has a range of effects on food:

“The friction causes substantial damage to the surrounding molecules, often tearing them apart, or forcefully deforming them.  The scientific name for this deformation is ‘structural isomerism’.”

“Structures of molecules are torn apart, molecules are forcefully deformed…and thus become impaired in quality.”

“Because of the force involved, the cells are actually broken, thereby neutralizing the electrical potentials, the very life of the cells, between the outer and inner side of the cell membranes.  Impaired cells become easy prey for viruses, fungi and other micro-organisms.”

“Since people ingest this altered food, shouldn’t there be concern for how the same decayed molecules will affect our own human biological cell structure?”

Cooking, by definition, both microwave and convection alters foods.  It breaks down molecules and makes them easier for the body to consume.   That’s why we cook foods.  These ‘deformed’ molecules and the ‘cells [that] are actually broken’ provide us with the nutrients that we need to live.  Indeed, our entire digestive system is set up to destroy cells into their molecular components, and break down molecules.   PAA1 has set up a straw argument.  Although the words are emotive — ‘substantial damage’, ‘tearing apart’, ‘forcefully deforming’, ‘impaired in quality’, ‘decayed molecules’ — they are simply a description of the function of our digestive system.

PAA1 tells us that microwaved food is toxic:

“Naturally occurring amino acids have been observed to undergo isomeric changes (changes in shape morphing) as well as transformation into toxic forms, under the impact of microwaves produced in ovens.”

As microwave energy only heats water molecules, that in turn, via convection, heat the food, any changes in molecules would occur exactly in the same way that it does in conventional cookery (up to the boiling point of water).  In fact, there is less chemistry occurring in microwaved food than occurs in conventional cooking.   This can been seen in the fact that microwaves do not brown foods, simply because the high temperatures required to do the browning (viz – chemically modify the food components to char and blacken them) are not reached in microwave ovens.  Microwaves do less damage to food that would boiling food in water (nutrients tend to be retained by food cooked in a microwave owing to the shorter cooking time).

PAA1 claims that microwaved food is radiated:

“Radiation as defined by physics terminology, is ‘the electromagnetic waves emitted by the atoms and molecules of a radioactive substance as a result of nuclear decay.’  Radiation causes ionization, which is what occurs when a neutral atom gains or loses electrons.  In simpler terms, a microwave oven decays and changes the molecular structure of the food by the process of radiation.”

Anthony Wayne has confused ionizing radiation with non-ionizing radiation.   Ionizing radiation can indeed alter molecules by adding or removing electrons from atoms.  Microwaves, coming from the non-ionizing part of the electromagnetic spectrum have no such effect.  There is no radioactive decay of food.

Microwaving and babies’ milk

Baby formula manufacturers often warn parents not to warm the formula in the microwave oven.  Some US agencies, according to Anthony Wayne, have stated that some nutrients and other properties of milk (or formula) may be destroyed or damaged by microwaving.  He uses this as further evidence for microwave ovens being dangerous.

Warnings are given to parents for one fundamental reason.  Microwave ovens do not heat food evenly (and that’s why turntables are used in ovens, to improve the distribution of the microwaves) and liquid milk is notorious for not heating evenly.   As a parent I am well aware that I must shake the bottle before giving it to my baby, to not do so risks dreadful burns to the child’s mouth and tongue.   If the bottle is ‘over heated’ then these hot spots will destroy nutrients.  Just in the same way that milk heated in a saucepan, if over cooked, will destroy nutrients.  It has nothing to do with microwaving, it has everything to do with heating.

Microwaved blood kills patient

In 1989 an unfortunate woman Norma Levitt underwent a blood transfusion in Oklahoma, USA.  The nurse, who was in a hurry to ensure that the blood was at the correct body temperature, heated it in a microwave.  Ms Levitt died shortly after the transfusion.

PAA1 states:

“This tragedy makes it very apparent that there’s much more to ‘heating’ with microwaves than we’ve been led to believe…It’s very obvious that this form of microwave radiation ‘heating’ does something to the substance it heats.  It’s also becoming quite apparent that people who process food in a microwave oven are also ingesting these ‘unknowns’.”

As can be expected in the USA, the unfortunate case of Ms Levitt ended up in court.  According to the June 1997 edition of the Risk Management Foundation, Harvard University Legal Report, it was alleged that the “heating of the blood led to haemolysis (break down of the red blood cells) and this released a large amount of potassium into the blood, which proved fatal.”

As for babies milk, blood heats unevenly in microwave ovens, and it is quite likely that patches of blood overheated and the cells were damaged.  Again, this isn’t because there are ‘unknowns’ in the blood, but because the heating of the blood was done poorly.

The inventor of microwave ovens

According to PAA1:

“The Nazis, for use in their mobile support operations, originally developed microwave…cooking ovens to be used for the invasion of Russia.  By being able to utilize electronic equipment for preparation of meals on a mass scale, the logistical problem of cooking fuels would have been eliminated…”

Electricity grids after battles are notoriously lousy and usually non-existent (particularly in Russia where there were very few powered villages or towns in 1941) and therefore transporting a hulking great electric microwave oven was a pretty stupid idea.   Perhaps, scarce diesel was used to run electricity generators, rather than putting it in battle tanks, so that troops could have hot chocolates?   Linking the Nazis with the evil microwave is a clever device, but completely wrong.  Troops cooked their food over fires, even at Battalion headquarters.  And cooking fuels were not that hard to come by.  Destroyed houses had lots of wood in them.

The microwave oven was invented in 1946 by Dr Percy LeBaron Spencer, a scientist working for Raytheon Corporation in the USA on radar applications.  He walked past a magnetron one day and discovered that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted.   From small things come great technologies.

Final stop – why cults and microwave ovens

PAA1 makes a big thing of ‘scientific research’ by Dr Hans Ulrich Hertel, a retired Swiss scientist.  Indeed, three of the ten pages of PAA1 are devoted to the Hertel study.  PAA1 states:

“Dr Hertel was the first scientist to conceive and carry out a quality clinical study on the effects microwaved nutrients have on the blood and physiology of the human body.  His small, but well controlled study showed the degenerative force produced in microwave ovens and the food processed in them…Hertel’s scientific study was done along with Dr Bernard H Blanc of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology…”

After the publication of the study in the Journal Franz Weber, No 19, 1992, which sported a cover of a grim reaper holding out its hand towards a microwave oven, the Swiss Association of Manufacturers and Suppliers of Household Electrical Appliances (SAMSHEA) sought and was given a court injunction against Journal Franz Weber and Dr Hertel to stop them claiming that microwave ovens were dangerous.  This injunction was sought under Unfair Competition laws.

Dr Hertel appealed this decision to the European Court of Human Rights and in 1998 he won, on the grounds that ‘freedom of expression is necessary in a democratic society.’

SAMSHEA’s claims were based on two main issues.  Firstly, that Dr Hertel’s sample size of eight people, could hardly be called a scientific study and secondly, that Dr Hertel’s collaborator, Professor Blanc disagreed completely with the findings, stating:

“While the published figures and description of the preliminary experiment are correct, I totally disassociate myself from the presentation and interpretation of the preliminary exploratory experiment carried out in 1989, which was published without my consent by the co-author…The results obtained do not in any circumstances justify drawing any conclusions as to the harmful effects of food treated with microwaves…”

PAA1 failed to note that Professor Blanc, Dr Hertel’s collaborator, and arguably the more qualified member of the team, completely repudiated Dr Hertel’s findings.  I wonder why?

Dr  Hans Ulrich Hertel is not unknown to the court system.  As President of the World Foundation for Natural Science, he was convicted and fined in 1999 for violating Swiss anti-racism laws. 

Some quotes from the World Foundation website:

On Jews:

Zionist-jews consider themselves to be something special and consider it their right to live at the expense of mankind and suck the planet dry like vampires. For centuries they have drawn from everything that has life. They have no right to exist. They will find themselves starving soon enough, even while taking the food from others, for they are spiritually on a trip to a hell of their own creation whether they realize it or not.

On the effect of electricity on the earth:

…the unnatural technologies of modern electricity and communication are increasingly affecting life’s natural steering mechanisms. The unnatural technical radiation is perverting the sun’s natural radiation and is thereby directly causing physical and mental illness to life.

On homosexuality:

Homosexuals are generally highly advanced people. They are as a rule, fine of stature, beautiful and of noble appearance, friendly, pleasant, gentle and of a rather spiritual nature and tend therefore often to work in the muses and spiritual professions. In order to balance their polarization - changed male-female status - most homosexuals are left-handed.

Every honest and normal human being must feel and suspect that such behaviour is abnormal and totally against morality, ethics, decency, uprightness, and purity and leads to depravity and decay. There has been nobody around up to the present time who could bring light into this highly disgusting situation.

And the World Foundation’s interest in microwaves?   Apparently, the “cellular phone (which uses microwave energy) is a strategy of Zion.”   Furthermore, “the secret world government is using mobile telephones to strongly reduce the world’s population in that the signals are said to make men infertile.”

An objective assessment of Dr Hertel’s writings and the views of his World Foundation, shed some doubt on the credibility of his microwave oven research.

Dinner time

Having looked at the facts of microwaving food and considered the attributes of those who claim it is dangerous, I must go and cook my dinner.  It should be hot within three minutes.

Click the link below to download the full PDF version of this article

Safety of Microwaves - Vernon.pdf

© David Vernon, 2003

First published in The Skeptic, Winter 2003, p30.  Click here