Everybody knows you're not supposed to heat breast milk or formula in the microwave. Why not? The top two reasons usually cited are 1) it kills nutrients, which is scientifically unfounded, unless you're leaving it in there for 20 minutes, or 2) it creates hot spots, which can scald baby, which would be slightly plausible if we weren't talking about a liquid, which is going to have convection currents and is going to be thoroughly mixed long before it gets to baby's mouth.
No, the only real reason not to heat milk in the microwave is also the best one: because if you do, your baby's momma will kill you. She read all those reports on the internets and she doesn't believe your scientific mumbo-jumbo about upwelling for a minute.
So what's Daddy to do when baby is crying for food and Mommy's out at yoga? Just running hot water from the tap over the bottle takes forever and wastes a lot of water. It takes a while for the water to get hot and then most of the heat is just running down the drain.
No, the only real reason not to heat milk in the microwave is also the best one: because if you do, your baby's momma will kill you. She read all those reports on the internets and she doesn't believe your scientific mumbo-jumbo about upwelling for a minute.
So what's Daddy to do when baby is crying for food and Mommy's out at yoga? Just running hot water from the tap over the bottle takes forever and wastes a lot of water. It takes a while for the water to get hot and then most of the heat is just running down the drain.
Remove these ads by
Signing UpStep 1: Heat some water in a measuring cup.
Grab the nearest Pyrex measuring cup. Put a couple ounces of tap water into it. Use the hot tap but don't wait for it to actually get hot--junior is hungry and time's a' wastin'! Stick the cup in the microwave for 1-2 minutes. You don't need a lot of water, because the bottle is going to displace a lot. You don't need a lot of time because, well, this is what microwaves are made for!
Visit Our Store »
Go Pro Today »
For one of the "reasons" not to microwave formula, you cited, "it creates hot spots," and debunked with and argument about convection currents in liquid. While quite true in principle, it doesn't necessarily apply to this case.
Microwaving anything will induce hotspots, just because of the way microwaves are generated and bounce around inside the enclosure.
You are (hopefully!) not heating the formula to very much above body temperature (not more than ~100-105F) or you can scald the baby's mouth. In such a case, the temperature differences between hot and cold regions are less likely to induce good convective flow, and so the hotspots can persist for a substantial time. Also, formula is thicker than water, which reduces the development of convection on short timescales (viscous inertia); you can verify this by heating a bowl of canned cream-style soup in a Pyrex cup.
For both reasons, rather than rely on convection, you really do need to manually mix the heated formula, and check the temperature after mixing. A good approach is to heat in very short steps (5-10 seconds at a time), mixing and checking at each step. This is sufficiently slow and awkward, especially when the young one is getting impaTIENT!!! :-O, that it is really not worth the hassle.
The point of this posting is that microwave ovens do not heat _anything_ uniformly. It's not a big deal for adults, who have (a) better tolerance and take less damage from overly-hot food, and (b) have learned what to do if they eat something too hot. Infants, as you well know, don't have either those skills or that tissue protection.
http://www.wddty.com/03363800368955544801/do-not-heat-milk-in-a-microwave-oven.html
Do not heat milk in a microwave oven
Heating or thawing human milk by microwave causes a decrease in the level of anti infective factors in the milk, even when low temperatures (20-53¡C) are used (Pediatrics, 1992; 89: 667-9).
In one study, conducted at Stanford University in California, microwaving at higher than 72¡C was found to cause a considerable decrease in all the tested anti infective factors. The Stanford researchers strongly rejected the use of microwaving, even at low temperatures, of human milk in hospitals.Another study, carried out in Vienna, found that microwave cooking induced high rates of change in food proteins that were not observed after conventional cooking. D-proline and cis-D-hydroxyproline were found in significant quantities in microwave heated infant milk formulas, whereas only L-proline is normally found in biological material.
(L stands for laevo-rotary, D for dextro-rotary, referring to the direction electrons rotate in their plane of optical polarisation.)
Lubec and his colleagues warned that "the conversion of trans to cis forms could be hazardous because when cis-amino acids are incorporated into peptides and proteins instead of their trans isomers, this can lead to structural, functional, and immunological changes" (Lancet, 1989; 9: 1392-3).
Other research has also found that microwaving infant formula can produce molecular changes in the amino acids in milk proteins, causing toxicity or affecting the nutritional value of the milk formula. Nevertheless, the quantity of proteins changed was very small (J Am Coll Nutr, 1994; 13: 209-10).
cute kid :)
The CDC says: "Avoid using a microwave oven to thaw or heat bottles of breast milk" They do not say "don't do it"
http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/recommendations/handling_breastmilk.htm
Plants get rain water. Rain comes from the sky. The sky is very cold. I know, because I spend allot of time up there. For every one thousand feet of sky, the temperature drops by about two degrees Celsius. Except the first few thousand feet of sky. Those first few thousand feet of sky are much warmer than the rest of the sky, because it is heated by the ground. So after the first few thousand feet of sky, there is a more significant temperature drop. Also, the sky is blue.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=55420