General Discussion

This is what some (1) raw food enthusiasts argue for, against cooking with or without microwaves. They argue cooking can reduce the nutrients in food, so people should consume raw foods instead.

These people don't understand what they're talking about. There's a reason why the human race began thriving once we learned how to make fire and cook our food.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/food-for-thought-was-cooking-a-pivotal-step-in-human-evolution/

Cooking also increases the energy they can get from the food they eat. Starchy potatoes and other tubers, eaten by people across the world, are barely digestible when raw. Moreover, when humans try to eat more like chimpanzees and other primates, we cannot extract enough calories to live healthily. Up to 50 percent of women who exclusively eat raw foods develop amenorrhea, or lack of menstruation, a sign the body does not have enough energy to support a pregnancy—a big problem from an evolutionary perspective.

This would be true if all else was equal, but it was being argued here that microwaves may uniquely cause damage over other methods of cooking.

It may be being argued, but it's unsupported by any research. There is no special mechanism for microwaves to cause "unique damage" to food. It creates heat and heat cooks the food.

I get that people are critiquing the studies, but it should be fair to at least consider it uncertain if microwaves are healthy or not; it sounds like people should avoid them when they can, but if they want to take the risk, that’s for them to decide, and there should be discussions on if it is healthy or not.

It would not be fair to "consider it uncertain" whether microwaves are unhealthy or not. They've been around longer than most of us have been alive and there wasn't some mass health epidemic after they were installed in homes across the planet. None of this material has even given an actual mechanism for why microwaved food is 'different' or 'risky' compared to food cooked in other ways.

For example, plants given microwaved water did not fare well. This study seems easily reproducible, and I am open to it being explained if it is not thought to be relevant, but I’m curious about your thoughts on it: https://www.giftofcuriosity.com/plants-microwaved-water/

This woman's 'study' is absurd. She couldn't even remember to water the plants regularly and then blames "microwaved water" when one dries out and dies from a lack of water in the summer sun.

What I concluded from this experiment is that both stove-boiled and microwave-boiled water would help the plants do well under optimal conditions. But as soon as the plants were stressed (such as from a hot day with no water), the plants given microwave-boiled water proved to be much more vulnerable than the plants given stove-boiled water.

What exactly is the microwave doing to the water here? Is she suggesting that putting water into the microwave creates some new chemical compound that isn't H2O? If so, what is the new compound and how is it being created? Why is she the first person in history to discover that putting water in the microwave can somehow transform it into something else?