[0:00]If you had to guess the most radioactive place on Earth, where would you pick?Let's use this banana for scale because bananas are high in potassium and around 0.001% of potassium atoms are naturally radioactive.
[0:13]Which means every time you eat a banana, you're ingesting around 50 micrograms of radioactive material.
[0:20]Now, at that rate, you would need to eat around 20 million bananas all at once to get a lethal dose of radiation.
[0:26]Though, by that point, I would say the radiation would be the least of your concerns.
[0:30]Now, just hanging out in a park for a day, you're exposed to around 65 bananas worth of background radiation from the soil and space.
[0:38]If you get in a plane, as you climb higher, you get less and less atmosphere above you to shield you from cosmic rays.
[0:44]Which means a 5-hour flight from New York to LA equates to around 150 bananas.
[0:49]What if you spent 24 hours walking around Chernobyl?Well, that's the equivalent of eating 1,200 bananas.
[0:55]Up above our atmosphere on the ISS, astronauts are blasted with over 4,300 bananas worth of radiation every single day.
[1:03]But even that is not the highest radiation dose a person is likely to receive.
[1:07]No, that award goes to your everyday smoker.Because tobacco contains highly radioactive polonium and lead.
[1:14]And when smoked, those atoms get directly into your lungs, firing radiation into your sensitive tissues at levels equivalent to being on the ISS.
[1:23]The difference is, astronauts get to go home, whereas smokers receive that dose day in and day out for decades.
[1:29]Subscribe for more banana based reasons not to smoke.
