BED

I found a couple of new strange fact blogs that have been filling my head with useless data to annoy my family and friends. For instance, this is an excellent post on the Radiation levels of bananas!

Lots of fun right?

The "banana equivalent dose", or BED, is used by nuclear power plants to put radiation leaks into perspective. Basically, how many bananas would you have to eat to be similarly irradiated?

Generally speaking, bananas contain way more radiation than what is leaking out of a nuclear power plant, and they frequently cause false alarm in radiation sensors when going through customs. Though, they are not as radioactive as the brazil nut.

Potassium-40, the radioactive element in bananas, decays into Calcium-40 most of the time. Unfortunately its half life of 1.2 billion years means it isn't a significant nutritional source of Calcium.