Columnist advocates measuring radiation exposure in banana units

BBC : Michael Blastland writes in BBC’s Go Figure column about a whimsical unit of radiation exposure: the BED, or banana equivalent dose. Originating sometime in the mid 1990s, the BED is defined as the radiation dose a person would absorb by eating one banana. Bananas, like most organic material, contain a certain amount of radioactive isotopes. Blastland contends that converting radiation exposure to bananas, instead of the current SI unit of sieverts, is a useful exercise for several reasons. He feels that measuring in bananas conveys to the lay person the ordinariness of radiation and that it brings home the point that it isn’t radiation itself that’s the problem but how much one is exposed to at a time. He writes, “By talking bananas, Go Figure doesn’t mean to trivialize the health risk of radiation…. But the way we measure things can change how we think about them.”