What is the radiation amount of an ordinary X-ray scanner? Will it affect food?

What is the radiation amount of an ordinary X-ray scanner? Will it affect food?

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To put it simply, there are very few, and it does not cause safety problems.

Many food processing companies use X-rays to detect foreign objects in their products. X-rays are also widely used to detect contaminants in food, measure weight, and check whether the packaging is intact.

Thermo Fisher, the company that makes such food scanners, stated that the amount of radiation received by a pie at the time of testing was 10 millisieverts. For comparison, the radiation dose of an X-ray chest radiograph is about 100 mSv.

A study by the World Health Organization in 1997 confirmed that radiation within 10,000 grays will not affect the safety or nutritional value of food. Ten thousand grays is equivalent to 10 million times the radiation dose when food undergoes X-ray inspection.

Ted LaBusa, professor of food and nutrition at the University of Minnesota, said that if you want to understand the meaning of 10 mSv, you can refer to the following data: the average person is exposed to 36,000 mSv from the environment every year. This is an average of 98 mSv per day and 4 mSv per hour.

In other words, the amount of radiation that a pie is exposed to when tested is equivalent to the amount of radiation that a person would be exposed to after spending 2.5 hours in a general environment.

In fact, because the radiation power of the X-ray scanner is too small, the photosensitive film will not be exposed after one or two exposures.

If you are still not at ease, you can refer to the radiation dose of food irradiation.

Food irradiation is a method of using X-rays, gamma rays, and other radiation to generate free radicals to kill bacteria, parasites, and insects in food. Its radiation power is much higher than that of ordinary X-ray detectors. The radiation dose of food irradiation is about 3000 sievert, which is almost 1 billion times that of X-ray inspection.

Food irradiation can kill harmful organisms in food and is a kind of disinfection method.

For this kind of disinfection technology, which has much higher radiation levels than ordinary X-ray inspections, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Food Science Committee of the European Community, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have all conducted detailed reviews.

In 2011, the European Food Safety Authority declared that food irradiation is safe. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also approved food irradiation for meat, poultry, eggs, wheat, and other foods (but all products that have been irradiated by food must be labeled "irradiated").

Will the vitamins and other nutrients in the food change after X-ray inspection?

In this regard, the FDA and the Food Standards Agency (Food Standards Agency) said there is no need to worry.

The changes in food caused by food irradiation (such as the generation of free radicals) are similar to other food preservation methods, such as vacuum canning or pasteurization. It does cause a part of vitamin loss during processing, but this is not possible with any food preservation method. One point to avoid. Of course, keeping food for a long time will also loss nutrients such as vitamins.

In addition, there is currently no evidence that food irradiation will cause health problems for consumers.

To sum up, X-ray scanners will not cause "radiation residue", and the radiation power of the model used for security inspection is very low, so the nutritional value of the scanned food will not be significantly lost, you don't need to worry.

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What is the radiation amount of an ordinary X-ray scanner? Will it affect food?-Safeagle