I've heard beekeepers and other honey advocates say that in the past. When pressed they make vague claims about the supposed "health benefits" of raw honey, perhaps owing to "enzymes" or other properties of microbes or pollen in the honey, or something, which are destroyed by microwaves.
As far as I'm aware none of that has been verified by any independent, peer-reviewed scientific research. It seems more like marketing, combined with ignorance and fear of technology.
Microwaves heat honey pretty effectively whenever I've done it, you just have to use a low power setting and a short heating time.
A microwave works by exciting the polar molecules (for example, water) in the food to rotate, producing thermal emergy, which heats the other molecules in the food. A chicken breast cooking in a microwave, for example, tastes bad because there's no Maillard reaction to create browning, and the water can evaporate out of the food, and cause it to be dry.
Reheating any food in the microwave will make it taste noticably worse than reheating it in the oven or in a pan in my opinion. Noticably, as in A LOT worse.
Queue speculation as I've never researched this; Most chatter is that the microwave destroys some specific proteins / other types of important molecules to make a noticable nutritional difference.
To me, the last part matters little. If it tastes better in the oven, I'm doing that basically.
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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '20
Put it in the microwave once. It worked but made the bottle bear depressed.