system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does smoking cigarettes give you low doses of radiation?
gpt
Cigarettes contain some radioactive elements.

This is not unusual. Many objects around you are slightly radioactive to some degree or another. You are exposed to radioactivity from anything from concrete to bananas to even being near other people.


Usually the doses are so low to be not being worth worrying about and in most cases the radiation comes in a from that won't be able to penetrate your skin anyway.

However smoking means that you inhale the stuff and instead of being protect by your skin you ar irradiated from the inside especially your lungs where much of the stuff that you inhale ends up.

With cigarettes the thing many people worry about is polonium, which is in cigarettes and gets into your lungs and may end up giving you lung cancer.

You may wonder why there is radioactive polonium in your cigarettes, it turns out it comes with the tobacco plants which are coated with it. Why are tobacco plants coated with that stuff? Because it is the product of a chain of radioactive reactions occurring in and above the fields, the original source of that apparently comes with the fertilizer people put on tobacco fields.

Cigarettes would give you cancer in other ways even without it but it makes it worse.