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Coffee Requires Cancer Warning, California Judge Rules (cnbc.com)
Scientists haven't rendered a verdict on whether coffee is good or bad for you but a California judge has. He says coffee sellers in the state should have to post cancer warnings. From a report: The culprit is a chemical produced in the bean roasting process that is a known carcinogen and has been at the heart of an eight-year legal struggle between a tiny nonprofit group and Big Coffee. The Council for Education and Research on Toxics wanted the coffee industry to remove acrylamide from its processing -- like potato chip makers did when it sued them years ago -- or disclose the danger in ominous warning signs or labels. The industry, led by Starbucks, said the level of the chemical in coffee isn't harmful and any risks are outweighed by benefits. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said Wednesday that the coffee makers hadn't presented the proper grounds at trial to prevail.
It's contributing to the bank account of the lawyer who brought the lawsuit.
Apparently in California an individual can bring a lawsuit "on behalf of the state" and then keep at least some of the damages.
... then so does toast.
Acrylamide isn't an additive. Trace quantities of acrylamide are a byproduct of the Maillard (browning) reaction in certain foods. If you think about it, toasted bread isn't that different from roasted coffee; it's dry heat applied to seed proteins and sugars. People have been consuming it pretty much as long as they've been cooking things other than meat.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It can be reduced but AFAIK not be eliminated. Acrylamide is created in the roasting process.
And the blurb is wrong - acrylamide have been reduced in chips but not eliminated. This by improving the processing, controlling temperatures better etc.
From TFA: "The culprit is a chemical produced in the bean roasting process that is a known carcinogen". Acrylamide in foods, including coffee, appears to be a byproduct of the Maillard reaction (the darker you make your toast, the more acrylamide you consume, for example, and bread crust itself contains acrylamide); it's also found in cigarette smoke, and is the primary source of exposure by smokers. An article about acrylamide points out that it has been part of humanity's diet for as long as we've been cooking our food.
It's a property of the bean (actually a seed) itself, and it occurs from simply heating it. The same is also true of potatoes (exact same carcinogen as well) and an existing solution is genetic modification. Thanks to the organic lobby and Greenpeace's FUD campaign, you'll never see it on store shelves, however.
I imagine the same would be needed for coffee, unless you add another chemical process to remove it after it is already ground, much like you would for decaffeinated coffee.
Because the people behind Prop 65 (which created this system) came from two distinct camps.
One camp wanted to eliminate some pretty toxic things that were commonly found in household products and drinking water.
Another camp believes in eliminating all "chemicals" because they must be harmful. Otherwise they'd be "natural".
The former group had a good point. The latter group is the left-wing equivalent of chemtrails believers. But the latter group was necessary to get the proposition passed.
The warning requirement is due to Proposition 65, a citizen's ballot initiative which passed in 1986 (I was too young to vote then, but did my best to try to warn people how stupid it was going to be if it passed). The judge's hands here are mostly tied. According to the proposition, if there are studies which show a material can cause cancer (not just in people but in laboratory animals), then the warning is required. I've often joked that it should be required above every exit door since sunlight is known to cause cancer.
The warning is pretty much useless now - every store and nearly every product has it so it carries zero information value. The only function it now serves is to enrich a small group of lawyers who go around filing lawsuits against small businesses (mostly owned by new immigrants who have no idea such a silly law could exist) who failed to buy a $5 warning placard to post somewhere in their business. They usually manage to wrestle $2k to $10k from the small business to settle the lawsuit.
It's not a problem with warnings themselves, but of weighing the level of risk. The labels don't give one any sense of risk degree. Perhaps we need a rating system, similar to movie ratings or Dept. of Homeland Security's "Homeland Security Advisory System" rating colors (which have since been altered in confusing ways).
By the way, the warnings are required by Proposition 65, which was voted into CA law. It's not meddling gov't, but meddling voters.
Let's make it better instead of throwing it out.
Table-ized A.I.
Sometimes, things turn out to be worthwhile - emission regs among them...
Sometimes, things turn out to be like MTBE, the gasoline additive mandated by the California Air Resource Board (aka CARB which creates the emission regs for California). The CARB basically ignored information provided by the EPA about the carcinogenic nature of MTBE and mandated it in all gasoline sold in the state because of heavy lobbying by ARCO and a big political push by environmental groups blinded by reducing smog. Because of the California MTBE laws, other states (including New York), also got on the MTBE wagon...
Fortunately, MTBE was eventually banned, but not until a decade later and after basically polluting many water supplies all over the country...
“At the time that the regulation was passed, I think that we were aware that it might be carcinogenic and that it could have some other health effects,” -- Dr. Andrew Wortman, scientist @CARB
This sounds to be in line with previous court judgements. Yes your coffee is hot. Put a sign on it.
You're alluding to the infamous McDonalds case. On the surface it seems nuts and it may still be a case of a stupid jury reaching a stupid verdict, but there are things about the case that are not known by the general public. I have a good friend who is a lawyer and we talked about this.
1) McDonalds kept serving coffee at a temperature very close to boiling and about 20 to 30 degrees higher than their competitors. The problem wasn't that some dumb person didn't know that hot coffee is hot but that McDonalds was deliberately serving it at an undrinkably high temperature.
2)McDonalds received a lot of complaints about the too high temperature of their coffee and refused to do anything about it. They received many hundreds of complaints.
3)The old lady who got burned did basically accidentally pour it on herself, but the case argument was that had the coffee been at a normal temperature of 20-30 degrees lower like McDonalds competitors served, she would not have suffered devastating burns that required hospitalization.
4)The lady's attorneys tried to settle the case out of court and McDonalds refused.
5)The original verdict was reduced by a judge as being excessive and she didn't end up with a million dollars, although she was awarded over $600,000.