How does the radiation from boar meat compare to sunlight? E.g. eating 500 grams is similar to sitting in the sun for 5 minutes, in very rough comparison.
It mostly doesn't compare - sitting in the sun for five minutes doesn't expose you to much in the way of ionizing radiation as almost all of it is filtered out by the atmosphere. And when you get out of the sun, it stops. Radioactively contaminated food glows at your insides for much longer. Cs-137 biological half-life is weeks:
Radiation is a pretty weird thing that is easily misunderstood because people use the same term to talk about very different things. While sitting in the sun will cause UV radiation and can result in skin cancer it's not the same as interesting cesium. Though both can cause cancer.
But if we're just talking about increase chance of cancer iirc the meat calculations you need to eat like 15 kg of boar a day from that region (like 3kg if the highest measured). I'll let you make your guesstimate from there. And we're not even talking about risk of cancer from eating that much meat.
Thanks for the reply, especially given that I worded my question poorly.
In my barely educated opinion the health risks of the radiation level measured in the boar meat is so low as to be ignorable. It might help people (like me) to be able to compare the health risk to other forms of radiation that we already accept.
> In my barely educated opinion the health risks of the radiation level measured in the boar meat is so low as to be ignorable.
This is fairly accurate. Though I wouldn't seek out those boars. I just wouldn't freak out if you found out later.
I would say that the bigger thing we can do is learn to relax and admit that we don't know much about topics we don't know much about. I'm all for more information, but this problem is more abstract and applies to far more things than radiation. Often the more heated a topic the less the average person knows about it though their confidence is often high.
