6 ms·
Banana Equivalent Dose
- charcircuit 4y agoI have no clue how safe bananas are to eat so this metric is meaningless to me.
- throwaway744678 4y agoSample size of one: I have eaten bananas, and I'm not dead.
- b112 4y agoJust think of all the lunatics living next to banana plantations! Or having banana trees in their back yard. And their children playing under those trees!! Monsters!
- agentgumshoe 4y agoAh for the old days where you only had to worry about the wafts of DDT floating over the fence!
- el_don_almighty 4y agoEveryone who ate bananas in this video are dead... New York City 1900 https://youtu.be/QlBinV6pFM8 https://youtu.be/QlBinV6pFM8
- rafael09ed 4y ago> the "banana equivalent dose" [is] "very useful in attempting to explain infinitesimal doses (and corresponding infinitesimal risks) to members of the public"
- cultureswitch 4y agoIt's not though, unless you have a strong a priori belief that eating a banana is safe with respect to radiation.
- thfuran 4y agoWho doesn't have a strong a priori belief that bananas are safe to eat?
- ed312 4y agoYou clearly fell for BigBanana's propaganda. More seriously -- challenging "US standard" dietary norms often leads to fruitful discussions of nutrition and how off-optimal most "common sense" tends to be.
- jwhiles 4y agoEating bananas is very safe. Unless there is a poisonous spider inside it.
- nektro 4y agotalked about here too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0
- iLoveOncall 4y agoMy favorite video of Veritasium, I knew it'd get posted as a comment when I saw the title!
- rafael09ed 4y agoIt seems banana for scale didn't come around for another 10 years
- hnarn 4y agoI appreciate this is supposed to be educational, but I have to wonder something regarding this point: > The radiation exposure from consuming a banana is approximately 1% of the average daily exposure to radiation, which is 100 banana equivalent doses (BED). If your scale starts at 100, maybe it’s not such a great educational example. If the Average Daily Exposure (ADE) is 100 BED, the number inflates in a way that make the values seem unnecessarily high. It’s implicitly a kind of “appeal to nature” argument, but already eating 100 bananas is completely unrealistic, and that’s just background radiation. The article goes on to say: > The maximum permitted radiation leakage for a nuclear power plant is equivalent to 2,500 BED (250 μSv) per year I really don’t think this is helpful, because first of all nobody eats 2,500 bananas and it doesn’t say anything about safety, and secondly we now know that this is the same thing as 25 ADE, which both sounds less and gives a better relative comparison to how small the amount is.
- lostlogin 4y agoBefore jumping straight to high BED scenarios, are there any banana standards? BED would appear to dependant on banana size and type, which isn’t defined as far as I can see. Is the EU standard banana a worthy banana for BED calculation? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No._2257/94#:~:text=The%20minimum%20size%20(with%20tolerances,Class%20I%2C%20Class%20II) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_N....
- ithkuil 4y agoThe intent here is not to show how harmful eating a banana is but instead showing how harmless living nearby a nuclear powerplant. If eating one banana only is comparable to living 50km from a nuclear powerplant for one entire year, then clearly the radiation you get from the powerplant is ridiculously small. That fact that all this is only 1% of the radiation dose you'd otherwise get due to background radiation should only help bringing the point home.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoMostly it is an example of failing at science communication, as highlighting the radioactivity of a banana basically just serves to make bananas seem more scary. Because radioactivity is scary: it can lethally damage without you feeling anything before your start puking. Saying living next to a reactor is safe because even bananas contains a bit of radioactivity is somewhat like saying living next to a Ebola lab is safe because there are viruses in bananas... it's not really speaking to the fear of getting caught up in the fallout when bad things happen at the reactor.
- HPsquared 4y agoThe human body itself is more radioactive than a banana. Again just looking at the potassium content (that is, the source of the banana radiation). From TFA: "These amounts may be compared to the exposure due to the normal potassium content of the human body of 2.5 grams per kilogram,[15] or 175 grams in a 70 kg adult. This potassium will naturally generate 175 g × 31 Bq/g ≈ 5400 Bq of radioactive decays, constantly through the person's adult lifetime" That is, you constantly contain about 400 bananas worth of potassium. Without this potassium, of course, you wouldn't be too healthy.
- Sardtok 4y agoSo, are you suggesting we measure nuclear radiation exposure in amounts based on cannibalism? AJED, Average Joe Equivalent Dose? How many trucks of refugees do you have to eat, to get exposed to as much radiation as say, being 100 km away from the blast of Little Boy?
- jn6118 4y agoI quite like the XKCD visualisation of this - eating one banana == 2 small blue squares. https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- mpliax 4y agoSo, eating a banana == sleeping next to 2 people. Later, virgins.
- JohnCClarke 4y agoThis comparison is misleading because it confuses irradiation and contamination. While the dose rate recorded by a Geiger counter at a nuclear site may be low, that radiation is being generated by particles as small as dust. Ingesting a particle by breathing or swallowing it can lead to long term internal exposure. It is also worth remembering that radioactive particles generate a static electricity charge so they are sticky. Think: sticky, invisible, dangerous.
- balderdash 4y agoThis reminds me of the Micromort - which I thought was supposed ch great idea, but never seemed to go anywhere… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
- baxtr 4y agoI actually use it with friends now and then and find it useful.
- Waterluvian 4y agoA challenge I have with understanding and communicating risk is that some risk is an instant and some is across distance/time/some quantity. If you skydive your chance of death is X. If you drive your chance of death is Y per hour (or km). Any advice from anyone on the best way to reconcile this? We could add a unit time or distance to the first kind, but I feel that betrays the fact that it’s mostly about “does your parachute deploy?” and is disconnected from how long or far you skydove that day. (these examples are easy to debate but I hope you get what I’m trying to communicate)
- setr 4y agoAren’t they already the same? You’re just not applying the same metric in both cases. The chance of dying in a car accident isn’t the number of miles driven, it’s the chance of a failure happening and killing you — the distance driven is simply more rolls of the dice. The same with parachute-failure — the number of chutes opened is the number of dice rolls. You should be saying skydiving death rate is X per chute
- burnished 4y agoWhat is the driving equivalent to one skydive? I think that question genuinely illustrates their point that some risk is best considered as a rate whereas some is as a discrete event but I am very interested if you can elaborate a perspective that reconciles that
- virgildotcodes 4y agoI wonder if focusing on this section in anti-smoking propaganda would be effective: Tobacco contains traces of thorium, polonium and uranium. The process of drying and then smoking the solid matter concentrates those radionuclides further, creating in essence technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material.
- sph 4y agoIt's not like people are addicted because they think it's harmless. And people routinely do things that are many times more harmful than smoking your first cigarette ever. Telling addicts they are harming their health is a terrible tactic to curb the problem. It's taken me 12 years to successfully quit smoking, and I knew about the lung cancer, the cardiovascular issues and the radioactive tobacco trivia all along.
- virgildotcodes 4y agoOh sure, I generally agree with you, and have also smoked on/off for the last couple decades. I just wonder if people’s general phobia of all things radioactive would further move the needle here. Edit: I have to say though, that health concerns are what ultimately made me quit for good, so maybe all that propaganda isn’t entirely useless.
- IndySun 4y agoThe other banana test. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A
- jozvolskyef 4y agoThe Banana Equivalent Dose is a misleading and incorrect because it has an implicit "over a lifetime" in its definition where instead it should be "until potassium level returns to normal". It is the lifetime dose one would be exposed to if the body didn't replace old material with new and instead stored the banana forever.
- jwie 4y agoNot all radiation is created equal, and the delivery mechanism is very important. Breathing in material emitting an otherwise harmless amount of alpha particles (essentially a helium isotope particle stripped of electrons) is very harmful. Those ionizing particles get into lung tissues and since they’re charged and have a lot of mass they can do a lot of damage in a local area. Internal doses are orders of magnitude more harmful. Radiation is generally safe, but there are types of radiation doses that are very harmful. It’s less about the radiation level and more about what kind, how it’s delivered, and over how long a time span.
- QuarterReptile 4y agoYou're conflating two things, so just to be clear about both bad things, for everyone else: Alpha radiation is massively damaging, but is blocked entirely by the outer, dead layers of skin. Once it gets inside your body where it can access vulnerable tissue, it's a different story. Contamination (think "source of radiation") that gets inhaled or ingested (committed) is bad because you fractionally take it with you, getting continually irradiated. Even worse, some committed contamination eagerly accumulates or replaces in processes where it won't be exchanged out. This is the case with iodine, and that is why iodine pills can be helpful in large releases of radioactivity.
- stefantalpalaru 4y agoThe "banana equivalent dose" is an error that refuses to die. Based on tables that estimate the effect of various radioactive isotopes acting for 50 years, people ignoring physiology decided that the average K40 in a banana will produce 0.078 microsievert of damage (rounded to 0.1 because it's close enough for jazz and comics). The reality is that, due to homoeostasis, the excess potassium you ingest is eliminated the next time you piss, so there's no accumulation inside the organism. Those 50 years become something like 12 hours and the radiation exposure is more in the ballpark of 0.00000213 microsievert. But that value is now too small to use it in science fanboyism, isn't it? https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-05/documents/520-1-88-020.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-05/documents/52... - page 156. That's where these people took the effective dose equivalent for K^40 from, but those values are for 50 years of exposure. "For radioisotopes of elements that are under tight homeostatic control by the human body, the inhalation or ingestion risk coefficients given in this document may not be appropriate for application to some exposure scenarios. For example, the ingestion risk coefficient for ^(40)K would not be appropriate for application to ingestion of ^(40)K in conjunction with an elevated intake of natural potassium. This is because the biokinetic model for potassium used in this document represents the relatively slow removal of potassium (biological half-time of 30 d) that is estimated to occur for typical intakes of potassium, whereas an elevated intake of potassium would result in excretion of a nearly equal mass of natural potassium, and hence of ^(40)K, over a short period." - ["Federal Guidance Report No. 13: Cancer Risk Coefficients for Environmental Exposure to Radionuclides"](https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-05/documents/402-r-99-001.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-05/documents/40...) - page 16 So, if you accept that the duration of exposure from eating a banana is 12 hours instead of 50 years, a dental x-ray is the equivalent of eating 2,347,417 bananas.
- sdwr 4y agoBoo! Get your facts away from my cute little factoids!
- Mistletoe 4y agoIt’s weird how bananas got the rap for having a lot of potassium. Kind of a meme I guess. It’s like the first thing you think about bananas and nutrition. A lot of stuff has a lot more though. I guess Swiss Chard equivalent dose didn’t have the same ring to it. Swiss chard, 1 cup cooked (960 mg) Spinach, 1 cup cooked (840 mg) Avocado, 1 cup (708 mg) Sweet potato, medium (700 mg) Bok choy, 1 cup cooked (630 mg) Potato, medium (610 mg) White beans, 1/2 cup (600 mg) Beets, 1 cup (520 mg) Brussels sprouts, 1 cup cooked (500 mg) Broccoli, 1 cup cooked (460 mg) Cantaloupe, 1 cup (430 mg) Banana, 1 medium (420 mg)
- dagw 4y agoThat is some weird and unhelpful mixing of units. There is no way to look at that data and work out which food has the most potassium pr. gram. At a guess a "medium" banana is possibly 1/3 - 1/2 cup raw, maybe less if cooked down? If that's the case it jumps to the top of your list again. And the "1 cup" of cooked chard, is that 1 cup pre or post cooking, packed or loose or perhaps pureed. The difference in weight between 1 cup loose raw chard and 1 cup cooked pureed chard is probably a factor of 10 if not more.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Mistletoe 4y agohttps://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/food-sources-potassium https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/food-sources-potassium This is a better list and everything is per serving. Spinach and potato are rocking banana's world at about double the potassium per serving.
- Symmetry 4y agoWhen I was growing up hearing about "fallout" was always in terms of some power plant accident and exposure meant some imperceptible increase in lifetime cancer risk. Much later in life I learned that the "fallout" from a thermonuclear bomb exploding a hundred kilometers upwind could easily mean death, not of cancer in a decade but in hours or days from acute radiation sickness. It seems strange that we use the same word in both cases where in other cases our words clearly distinguish amounts by levels of danger, "falling pebble" versus "falling boulder", "raindrop" versus "flood", etc. It would be good if we could have that with radiation dangers as well.
- lalopalota 4y agoIt rained, watch out for puddles. It rained, watch out for flooding. The word used is "rain" in both cases. Degrees of danger is communicated elsewhere. Same with "fallout".
- vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago[dead]
- pvaldes 4y agoIn resume, if we imagine than Plutonium is Potasium instead then nuclear plants are safe. This is bananas.