Radioactivity in Food (Organic Food) | Hacker News Reader

Radioactivity in Food (Organic Food)

nrc.gov

45 pointsjdcampolargo37 comments

Probably the most prolific killer as far as radioactive vegetation is Polonium 210 in tobacco. [0]

I always thought it made a good case for organic cigarettes, which otherwise sounds really silly on the face of it. My logic being that organic tobacco should not use phosphate fertilizer which is likely the source.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19960838/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19186689/

I read something about that years ago, and the thing that made it stand out was how binary it was. You could smoke for twenty years, then one day you get a tiny mote of some radioactive element stuck in your lung and all the sudden it's cancer time. Primarily people shouldn't smoke cigarettes, but it just seems like a cruel twist that they would fertilize the crops with something that does that.

I sometimes think it might be nice to grow some quality pipe tobacco in my garden. My understanding is that if you intersperse it with other plants it acts as a natural pest repellant. And while I'm virtually a non-smoker (about 20 cigarettes in my entire life and a handful of cigars), I can see the appeal of occasionally smoking a pipe packed with tobacco that I grew and cured myself.

is this used with weed crops

I believe most (though perhaps not all) definitions of "organic" do allow phosphate rock fertilizer.

Damn. This is a sensitive issue. Imagine if you were in charge of public health. Would it be a good idea to spend money on making cigarettes “safer” or better to encourage smoking cessation?

I have no source and could be completely wrong, but anecdotally it seems that Japan smokes like a fucking fiend and yet doesn’t have people dropping like flies from cancer. They also are far more selective of their tobacco and perhaps, unlike the US, forced tobacco companies to stop using such fertilizer?

> Explanations for the smoking paradox in Japan

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12889681/

What's with "organic" in the title? The link doesn't mention anything about organic food, unless it's meant to be pedantic that food is organic matter.

I second the question - is there non-organic food? For me the opposite of organic is "mineral".

Does that make organic salt an oxymoron?

Well, yeah. An endless source of amusement, at the very least.

Good find!

Some food tastes like cardboard, especially store-bought pretty vegetables, so definitely. :)

Is there anything that isn't "natural" if all things come from, and are a part of, nature at some point? Deoxygenated, flavor pack-blended orange juice is considered "100% natural". Perhaps marketing terms need to be replaced by the whole truth about raising/production and processing.

Store-bought tomatoes have been selectively bred for appearance, shelf-life, and durability. They taste terrible compared to home-grown, vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes but the latter would not survive all of the shipping and handling in the grocery supply chain.

But cardboard is also organic.

From TFA:

> All organic matter (both plant and animal) contains some small amount of radiation from...

I propose changing the HN headline to just delete that parenthetical, or if you really must keep it, "(Organic Matter)" seems less confusing.

In many places "Organic" as a label means that it was grown without chemical pesticides, and the does not include GMO seed. At least for produce. For "organic" animal products, it means they are only fed from "organic" sourced crops and/or range feeding (grass, bugs, etc).

Legal requirements will vary from nation to nation.

Wow, I never thought of Brazil nuts being that radioactive. I guess because they pick up more metals from the soil? They're very high in selenium. I've definitely picked up the radioactivity of bananas on my Geiger counter, but now I think I gotta run out and get a bag of Brazil nuts.

In my experience it will vary greatly with where they are grown. The ones I have gotten from Costco aren't above background.

Keep in mind that the level of uranium could be above what you'd want to consume (ideally 0ppm...ha) and still not measure on a Geiger counter. This is why I wanted to setup a scintillating detector. You have to do long running tests in a shielded chamber and look at the spectra to see what, if any, contaminates are present.

Interesting. By no means am I a nuclear expert, so there's a high likelihood I wasn't measuring what I thought I was measuring. What I thought I experienced consistently was a few extra CPM when I placed a bunch of bananas next to my off-the-shelf Geiger counter. Wish I kept track of what I actually measured. I'll have to try again.

Bananas will read higher. I'm talking about brazil nuts. It depends on the food and what the source of the radiation is. If you want to find low level uranium contamination in most foods, you'll need something more sensitive than a geiger counter. If it was enough to see on the geiger counter, eating it would be a really bad idea.

There is a House M.D. episode based on this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_It_Takes_(House) ), where the titular Dr. is called in to diagnose and treat a CIA agent poisoning,

[SPOILER AHEAD]

but due to the secrecy of the agent's work they are given an amended patient travel history when really they had been to Brazil.

“the annual average dose per person from all sources is about 620 mrem”

That’s the mrem of 62 chest x-rays. From food and drink annually.

Should we be alarmed? Or just more comfortable with lots of diagnostic x-rays?

EDIT: Thank you. I missed a link in the article that clarifies: “From food and water (40 mrem)”

That's not just from food and drink. Food and drink is much less, as you can see if you read that page.

From the Hacker News guidelines[0]:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's okay to mention that the article says something, as your guidelines say. You're specifically not allowed to question if someone read it. Since the person you're responding to followed the "good" example you provided perfectly, I think his comment is okay.

You'll notice that chest x-ray is listed twice, the one you are referring to is a single exposure. But the chest x-ray you're thinking of is probably the latter, which is 700mrem.

Fwiw, no, you should not be concerned. An annoying thing about radiation is that the numbers are not straight forward and our measurement devices are REALLY sensitive. Rem, and Sieverts (Sv), are both dosage measurements, which means they vary based on where they interact with the body. It also changes with the type of radiation that you're exposed to. This is probably assuming whole body and gamma.

Finding numbers can also be quite hard because top google hits will be ones like this[0] which show charts for short time exposure (acute exposure). Or you get complicated ones like from the DOE[1] which calls itself "user friendly", but that's because what we discussed above. You'll notice a place in China (Yangjiang) with 600mrem, India (Kerala coast) with 1rem, and a place in Iran (Ramsar) with a bit above 15 rem! But studies consistently show that these people do not have increased rates of cancer[2,3] (if study says "less", read as "no difference"). It is worth noting that radiation safety levels are purposefully set with a high margin of safety, as measurements of an actual dose someone obtained isn't straight forward either. You may also be interested to know that astronauts (~60rem/yr) have no significant rise in cancer rates (less than 1 year life difference)[4] and in Chernobyl 134 workers got doses between 70krem and 1.34Mrem (thousand and million), and only 28 of those died (high rate, but we're talking about 10^5 to 10^7 times higher dosages than our number AND that all this is acute or chronic while our number is "evenly" spread over a year).[5] This should help give you some bounds (considering we're also including 1980's Soviet medicine for suitability rates) to help make some intuition.

For a more fun and visual comparison see here[6].

Hope this helps.

[0] https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/radiation-effe...

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120970113.pdf

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S05315...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4674188/

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44858-0

[5] https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/high-...

[6] https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Wouldn't a better measure be radioactivity by the origin geography of food sourced? I can't imagine they sampled carrots from around the world and determined there was no stat sig difference. Growing carrots in Bikini Atoll is probably worse than carrots in Amazonian jungle.

"All organic matter (both plant and animal) contains some small amount of radiation from radioactive potassium-40 (40K), radium-226 (226Ra), and other isotopes"

Would this factoid be true pre-1945 Oppenheimer / Los Almost test? Because the world powers have carried out close to ~2056 nuclear detonations since 1945.

>Would this factoid be true pre-1945 Oppenheimer / Los Almost test?

Yes - K-40 is primordial and Ra-226 is part of the uranium series from U-238, which is also primordial.

Killer bananas from outer space with their radioactive potassium!

Brazil nuts are bad for multiple reasons, but I'm not worried that they're radioactive.

It's good to do the basic research to survey, but too often research is picked up by the media and distorted.

Why are brazil nuts bad exactly? I eat a couple daily to help with symptoms from hashimoto's and test my selenium levels frequently since not all nuts are created equal.

That's a nice reference. It's good to know a dental x-ray is only 1.5 mrem, compared to a full body CT scan coming in at 1000 mrem.

When I was a kid, analog/developed x-rays used more energy. With the advent of FPDs, the energy needed to deliver similar contrast ratios has been reduced.

"Higher patient doses through X-ray imaging procedures", Physica Medica 2020

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S112017972...

Let's just get the obligatory, relevant XKCDs out of the way:

Hot Banana: https://what-if.xkcd.com/158/

Dose chart: https://xkcd.com/radiation/

I wonder if the NRC chart takes into account the "cold pasteurizing" and other methods of deliberately irradiating food.

That process of irradiating food doesn't make the food radioactive.

Facepalm.

> Irradiation does not make foods radioactive, compromise nutritional quality, or noticeably change the taste, texture, or appearance of food. In fact, any changes made by irradiation are so minimal that it is not easy to tell if a food has been irradiated.

https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/food-irra...

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