Are Bananas Radioactive?
No worries, you’ll stay healthy even if you consume 40 million bananas at once.
I love educational comparisons, especially in physics. Check this out: Bananas are radioactive!
The banana equivalent dose, a measurement of a banana’s ionizing radiation, is 0.0000001 Sv (Sievert). The reason is that bananas contain naturally occurring radioactive isotopes of potassium, ⁴⁰K. When you eat a banana, you are exposed to that radiation.
Is 0.0000001 Sv a lot? A lethal dose of radiation is 4 Sv. To die from bananas, you need to consume 4 / 0.0000001 = 40 million bananas at once. You will probably eat a little less than that, even if you are hungry.
Anyway, the banana radiation will not accumulate in your body but come out in urine fairly regularly. Your body needs to maintain an optimal number of potassium ions and will get rid of the excess as soon as it can.
So dying from exposure to banana radiation is out of the question.
