NEWTON's Question of the Week

Question of the Week

Name: Julia
Status: other
Grade: other
Location: Outside U.S.
Country: United Kingdom
Date: Winter 2011-2012

Is it possible to magnetize food by contact with a magnetic material, and if so can ingestion of the food have any biological effects such as stimulating growth of the various types of tissue cells, e.g., bone, muscle, fat cells? I have read that growth of fractured bones can be induced through the application of magnetic fields. Can the iron in meat be magnetized through contact with the iron, aluminium or steel cooking pot?

Answers from Our Expert Staff

There are quite a lot of advertising claims about magnetism and the effects that magnetic fields can have on biological systems. Few of the claims I have heard or read about seem to me even remotely plausible. It's true that iron, and many iron compounds, are ferromagnetic materials, but the iron in food is nearly all bound up in proteins, and the iron atoms are not close enough to each other to have anything like the kind of behavior we associate with pure iron. No, the iron in meat cannot be magnetized through contact with iron, aluminum, steel, or any other substance. You can align the iron atoms in meat by putting them in a sufficiently strong magnetic field, but the alignment will disappear as soon as the meat is removed from the field, leaving no residual effect.

Tim Mooney

In order to be ferromagnetic (there are different forms of magnetism, but when people commonly refer to magnetism they typically mean ferromagnetism), iron (or iron oxide) must be in a metallic form with domains ("grains") that exceed a certain size. Dissolved ions of iron or chemically bonded iron (the forms commonly found in foods) are not ferromagnetic, and so you cannot magnetize them.

Hope this helps,
Burr

Julia

Can you magnetize food? The simple answer is no.

You can't do something to food such that it retains the capability to exhibit a magnetic field.

For a detailed explanation of magnetism, please refer to this URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet

Some substances exhibit magnetism and others do not. Well, what if some foods contained substances that exhibited magnetism, could the food then be magnetized?

There are three types of magnetic materials:
Ferromagnetic (Iron in some form or another)
Paramagnetic; (platinum, aluminum and oxygen); and
Diamagnetic (carbon, copper, water and plastics).

Paramagnetic materials exhibit very, very weak magnetic properties and Diamagnetic materials exhibit extremely weak magnetic properties. In general, world-wide diets, these substances are not present in the human diet.

Iron in foods is not physically assembled in the food such that it would exhibit measurable magnetism. Aluminum pots are made of non-ferrous material and does not significantly respond to magnetic fields with attracting or repelling forces. Iron and Steel cooking pots can be magnetized, but their molecular magnetic orientations (domains) are not aligned and therefore they do not exhibit strong magnetic fields. Besides, if the pots were magnetized, they would lose their magnetism when they are heated because the heat destroys the uniform alignment of the magnetic domains.

Finally, does magnetism effect human biology? There is no evidence at this point in time that magnetism has any effect on human biology; however, the otherside of electromagnetism (electric current) is used to speed the healing of broken bones. There are commercial products in the markets that doctors recommend for speeding the healing of bones.

Sincere regards,
Mike Stewart

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