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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.
the coffee makers hadn't presented the proper grounds
So what do they do with all their waste product?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Proper grounds. I see what you did there.
When everything has to have a warning label the labels start being ignored. Maybe it's time to just start saying everything in California causes cancer and call it a day?
When are they putting a label on the Welcome to Los Angeles sign on the freeway. Plenty of nasties in that air.
everything is a carcinogen in california...
Putting too many warning labels has the habit of making people numb to actual dangers and warning labels.
And why's that? Because the more coffee is roasted, the more carcinogen it has. And why Starbucks? Before heavily roasting coffee is a way to give ordinary cheap beans a stronger flavor.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I really wish we could stop with foods being either "good" or "bad" for you. My guess is even if you actually get the science to say if something is good or bad, the chances are that it's really only very marginally good or bad for you at reasonable/non-OCD intake levels, not so good or bad that it will swing the health of a normal person.
Even foods/beverages that are demonstrably good or bad for you aren't either in very small amounts. Sugar isn't good for you, but if I ate a glazed donut once a year? It's not going to change anything.
I'm sure there's some marginal value in looking at high-volume consumption foods like coffee, but at this point people have been drinking it for a couple of centuries and tons of it over the last century and we don't have a plague of people dying from coffee poisoning.
Other than the obvious lack of utility for "good' and "bad" labels, all it does is encourage people to over-consume "good" foods, needlessly avoid "bad" foods, all magnified by a marketing tsunami of food companies touting their products as beneficial.
Indeed, this is idiotic.
There is ample evidence showing that coffee is surprisingly good for you. Saying it has to be labelled a "carcinogen" is doing nothing to help anybody's health, but is contributing to people ignoring warning labels, which is not a good thing. California's laws are stupid and counterproductive.
http://time.com/4116129/coffee-longer-life/
http://www.webmd.com/alzheimer...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/this-is-your-brain-on-coffee/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/16/456191657/drink-to-your-health-study-links-daily-coffee-habit-to-longevity
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I agree! When I lived in the L.A. area, a newspaper article said that there were over 120 poisons in the air in the area where I lived.
Recently I was looking at an computer item on Newegg. There was a California notice that it was poisonous. How should I understand that???
Here is a example I just found: Combination Wrench, 5-7/8", 9mm,Chrome Vanadium Steel, Westward, 36A224 . How can a steel wrench be poisonous?
The California notice:
"WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including one or more listed chemicals which are known to the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov"
Why isn't there some explanation of the poison???
It seems to me that California has been poorly managed since Grey Davis was governor. But, I moved away more than 30 years ago.
I have no idea why anybody would even litigate this. I have yet to see a single thing there that doesn't have this warning.
If I were a coffee maker I would make a whole batch of coffee named "Cancer Coffee" with giant "Cancer!!!" warning labels making up the whole packaging. That would stand out and everyone would admire the absurdity of the whole thing.
Or better yet, a coffee with the judges scowling face on the label, called "JUDGEMENT DAY COFFEE".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... 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.
I'm kind of curious, are doors in California required to have warnings along the lines of "Warning: outside contains sunlight, which is known to the state of California to cause cancer."?
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
They should put warning labels on research as well. It has been proven that scientific research causes cancer in rats.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If everything is critical, nothing is. If everything is important, nothing is. If everything is a carcinogen, nothing is.
Unless you put a qualifier next to it, it's meaningless because it voids any importance the label could originally have had. There is a difference in how likely it's gonna kill you, and this has to be stressed. Yes, working as a liquidator for Chernobyl, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee are all likely going to cause cancer in you. But one is quite certainly going to kill you quite soon, one is likely to kill you somewhere in the future and one is ... well, we don't know but might kill you ... at some point in time.
And unless we establish some kind of way to differentiate between them, such labels will lose all meaning they might have had. If I can't avoid doing or eating something that is labeled as "causes cancer", why bother trying to avoid any of them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Trouble is that the only good food is kale. And kale is inedible.
Does make an OK packing material if properly dried
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
This sounds to be in line with previous court judgements. Yes your coffee is hot. Put a sign on it.
Perhaps they should put "Crush danger" on sacks of it. If a big enough bag is dropped on someone from a sufficient height it may injure. After all, how many such bagfulls of this need to be drunk in order to significantly increase the chance of cancer?
Which kills the most people prematurely per year in the USA - coffee cancer, obesity, air pollution or motor vehicle accidents? Which causes the most across the rest of the planet? Lets deal with all of the dangers buts lets set some priorities, Deal with the ones that cause the most damage first.
For comparison of importance, which has caused the most questionable election results - illegal immigrants, fraudulent voters, jerrymandering or termites?. We can probably deal with the termites later.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
So what was the reaction when Trump wanted to move toward giving meal kits to the poor instead of letting buy whatever they want? Rawwwwwr!
The issue is the "meal kits" were not nutritionally sufficient. They also proposed that the meal kits should contain cheap, obesity-enhancing processed foods. After all, it's the obesity-enhancing formulations that make them cheap.
Also, farmers and other agribusiness were the primary objectors. They'd like to sell their product. Frequently without having to bribe government officials.
Finally, I gotta love the hypocrisy of screaming "nannyism" while supporting a program that explicitly tells people "eat this".
To investigate "coffee", go to sciencedaily.com, do a search on term "coffee":
Benefits of drinking coffee outweigh risks, review suggests:
Drinking coffee could lead to a longer life, scientist says
Three to four cups of coffee a day linked to longer life
Three or more cups of coffee daily halves mortality risk in patients with both HIV, HCV
Higher coffee consumption associated with lower risk of early death
I like things like this last study quite a bit: there are people who obsess over the importance of double-blind clinical trials, but those are invariably an investigation of a single chemical substance on a relatively small population, often just looking at the incidence of some particular problem ("cancer of the left-pinkie")-- whole population studies tell you something about the way actual human beings live, and don't make implicit assumptions like dying of cancer is worse than heart failure (or getting hit by a car...).
We've apparently got an issue at present where the law (and not just in California, thanks for playing) requires labeling "known carcinogens" without any sense of whether the product as a whole is good or bad for you.
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.
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.
I could find a hundred other sources saying the same thing. Those just happened to be the ones at the top of my list.
Sorry somebody downmodded you as troll: I think they saw that you were gratuitously slamming news sources, and didn't realize you were in fact actually on topic, since you were commenting on the sources I linked.
With that said, however, your comment on the sources was edging toward troll, or possibly simply prejudice. It doesn't make a whit of difference that the New York Times is "part of the big-4 media monopoly"; their Tuesday Science Section continues to be one of the best sources for science and health information. Sorry you don't like them because they don't fit your personal bias, but you very much need to understand that it is you, and not them, who has the bias.
And, by the way, if there are four of them, it's not a monopoly.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com