# Radiation = drink beer?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/radiation-drink-beer/360282>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [June 11, 2006, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/radiation-drink-beer/360282 "2006-06-11T05:24:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Ender\_Will](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/eb9ed0/32.png) [@Ender\_Will](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ender_Will)\
**Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/radiation-drink-beer/360282/1 "2006-06-11T05:24:37Z")

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My roommate is claiming that a scientist told him that if you are exposed to radiation, you should drink either milk or beer to help eliminate it from your system. This seems patently ridiculuous to me, but I’m not an expert.

Anyone heard of this, or am I getting my crank yanked?

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 5:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/radiation-drink-beer/360282/2 "2006-06-11T05:35:33Z")

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If you were exposed to radioactive thorium, drinking milk might help prevent it from replacing some of the calcium in your bones and causing you problems later on. But that presumes the milk isn’t the source of the thorium, and it might not, you know, _work_.

As for beer, I don’t know. It might induce you to pee more which might have good effects.

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**Author:** ![groman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/73ab20/32.png) [@groman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/groman)\
**Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/radiation-drink-beer/360282/3 "2006-06-11T05:47:07Z")

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I don’t know, I’ve always heard it circulated as a “known fact” as a child that drinking wine is good for radiation poisoning, and being drunk during exposure might lessen long term effects. I mean this isn’t normal urban legend like circulating fact, my dad was a physicist and worked in a research institute with an experimental reactor (Of course he worked there as a mainframe simulation programmer or some such, but still his friends were from that area of expertise).