Under California’s Proposition 65 law, cancer warnings are hopping up all over the place. We have another one today as a California Judge Rules Coffee Must Carry Cancer Warning.
Coffee in the state of California must carry a cancer warning, a judge here ruled, in a blow to Starbucks and other retailers which had argued that a state law meant to protect consumers shouldn’t apply to them.
The proposed ruling Wednesday from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle found that Starbucks and other companies failed to prove their case that a chemical found in coffee posed no significant harm.
A nonprofit called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics sued coffee sellers in 2010, claiming the presence of acrylamide, a chemical created during the roasting process, is carcinogenic and requires a warning under the state law known as Proposition 65.
Under Proposition 65, cancer warnings already appear in places as far-ranging as apartment-building lobbies, parking garages and restaurants. Businesses must warn about the presence of any of more than 900 chemicals on a list of those known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Acrylamide, used for industrial processes like making paper and dyes, is also created during the cooking process for many baked and fried foods, including potato chips, bread and french fries. Many of those products also contain the cancer warnings as a result of litigation.
Other Things that May Cause Cancer
- Breathing
- Thinking
- Eating
- Drinking
- Living
Things Suspected of Causing Brain Degradation
- Living in California
- Living in Illinois (I am clearly at risk)
Things Guaranteed to Cause Brain Degradation
- Listening to Hillary
- Living in Washington D.C.
Proof of Brain Degradation
- Donating money to Hillary
- Donating money to the Clinton Foundation
- Believing Hillary’s reasons on why she lost
This was a public service announcement.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
“Still beautiful but way too many screwy people and way to progressive and expensive.”
The book “The New Geography of Jobs” is an in depth study into why people and companies gravitate to “expensive” places. The summary analogy is two dating sites – one (let’s call it “Dallas”) has 10 men and 10 women and the other (“Bay Area”) has 10,000 men and 10,000 women. Even if the “Bay Area” dating site is 3 times as expensive as the other, what chance to both men and women have of meeting multiple potential partners who are good fits?
Quote of the day: “Coffee is connected to cancer development by the fact that coffee is sometimes drunk by living people and only living people develop cancer,” said Robert A. Weinberg, an oncologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to The Los Angeles Times.
How do you account for the fact that the people of Okinawa and the people of Sourthern Italy both live to an average of 100, yet if the ones that cease eating the traditional diet end up with the same average lifespan as the rest of the world? How about the fact that it’s been known since the 1930’s that every animal species tested lives significantly longer when fed according to CRON (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition, i.e. a near starvation diet, but with all necessary vitamins and nutrients). Diet clearly impacts lifespan, and more importantly, healthspan (the number of years you remain healthy). Maybe, however, it’s not just what you eat, it’s when, and how much. I recommend spending a 12 hour period each day with no food (i.e., from dinner until you break fast, er, breakfast).
Yep . . . eating the amount of meat in a ‘normal’ US diet is linked to colon cancer . . . generally later in life (over say ~50) also digesting meat puts a burden on the liver as the anabolic products of proteins are toxic . . . on the other hand humans do need to consume a certain amount of protein – most easily obtained in the form of eggs or meat to survive – as we can not synthesize certain amino acids we need to survive . . . especially for vegans it’s VERY hard to eat enough (generally legumes) to get the dose of protein they need . . .
I am a physician that practices natural medicine with 25+ years of experience. What I see in my clinic is that vegetarians and especially vegans tend to have worse health because they don’t get the basic nutrition they need, and they certainly don’t live longer. Centenarians (people 100+ years old) usually eat more traditional diets including meat and lots of animal fat. You could make a very good case that eating factory farmed meat causes disease, which is why I recommend to always eat organic grass fed beef.
There was a time — not so long ago — when California truly was the end of the rainbow. CA had world-class agriculture, mines, oil fields, steel mills, refineries, shipyards, automobile factories, aircraft plants — on & on. Government statistics said that California had a bigger economy than France … and it sounded about right. Now most of that productive economy has gone, buried under a toxic dump of government regulations. Government figures still say that California has an economic pulse — but it seems to be mostly an unsustainable brew of realtors selling houses to lawyers who sue doctors treating realtors. It is truly sad how quickly that immensely productive economy was destroyed.
Right, and it would take Mexico about five years to raise and equip a million man army to fight the next battle in Polk’s War of 1848.
BTW I signed a petition the other day to put the question up to the CA voters as to whether CA should be split up into several states. The petition gatherer told me people in LA usually won’t sign it.
When is California going to ban, or at least put warnings on that dangerous, lethal chemical dihydrogen monoxide?
When you find a sealed box somewhere these days, there is a simple way to find out whether its contents were put in before or after 1945: simply check for the absence or presence of caesium-137. Since 1945 nuclear tests and nuclear accidents (most recently Fukujima) have contaminated earth’s atmosphere with radioactive isotopes (mainly caeasium134&137, carbon-14, strontium-90, iodine-131) galore. The good news is that these have relatively short half-lives (the most pernicious is caesium-137, half-life around 30 years). Now, I cannot prove this, but I have some anecdotal evidence that areas of Europe that were particularly strongly affected by the fallout from Chernobyl in 1986 saw a big surge in cancer cases. Is it a big stretch to suspect that apart from the fact that we have a longer average life span, the introduction of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere has affected the incidence of cancer globally?
Posters here and the general understanding is that eating healthy will make you live longer. The real answer is genetics determines approximately how long you’re going to live. The misinformation out there is made to separate you from your money.
Countless studies show vegetarians live longer than meat eaters, so there is a connection between what you eat and longevity. Whether or not it’s worth giving up meat for an extra 5 or so years is debatable.
“As an aside, one small sign of the infinite wisdom of God, was that he had Moses write the Law on stone tablets. Very effectively putting reasonable limits on how much of the stuff Moses could bring with him.” Ever hear of the Talmud? 613 judicial interpretations of biblical law. Nothing new under the sun. Also, hoboes are itinerant workers — you described bums.
Exactly, her_hpr. A hundred years ago people died of other things before they could die of cancer, and, if they did happen to die of cancer, it may not have been correctly diagnosed. Cancer has been found in ancient Egyptian fossils, and the words Cancer and carcinoma originated from Ancient Greece. Cancer is not a new problem.
In the end, we will all die of something, and if we avoid problems like heart disease, strokes, not to mention death from flu or plague, it makes the remaining causes of death more likely, including cancer, and that is true despite the fact that we are probably exposed to far less carcinogens than a hundred years ago when there was little effort to control air and water pollution, and we didn’t know that smoking kills.
Uhm . . . most cancers occur later in life . . . life expectancy has risen . . . thus, cancer rates have increased . . . in the 16th century the incidence of cancer was likely not much different from now, it’s just that a. people died younger (mostly of other causes) and b. most cancers that DID occur weren’t diagnosed as such due to the state of medical knowledge. // As for Chemicals that cause harm, oxygen is lethal in high enough concentration, so is water in large enough quality, ALL vitamins cause significant problems if you take to much (ok vitamin C is an exception) . . . yet no human can live without those. Labeling ‘foodstuffs’ just because the ‘contain’ something that causes cancer (or is generally harmful) in some concentration is a fools errand (in fact everything you eat and breathe is radioactive … radioactivity is known to cause cancer and there is not evidence that there is any lower limit below which radioactivity is safe … thus living – in so much that is requires eating and breathing – by definition seems to cause cancer . . . Thus Mish is right living => causes cancer.
@Kinuachdrach : If you could take the Northern counties that want to break off (i.e. the “State of Jefferson” counties) and leave the rich, educated parts of California that would help us too. California would be about the 7th largest economy in the World, and without huge military spending and Federal tax imbalance we suffer from we would be a lot better off. We could get universal healthcare, invest more in our schools and put in sensible immigration policies. You would have to promise that you will keep poisoning your kids to ensure we get low gas prices though, but most of you want to do that anyway (I’ve never figured out why). If the price is Death Valley, then I’d be willing to pay. Plus we’ll throw in Bakersfield as well 😉
A question lurking in the deep dark penumbra to the Constitution — Can the States or the Federal Government expel a State from the Union? The rest of us might miss all those Tesla electric cars flooding out of California, but that is about it. Hollywood has already gone Canadian, so there would be no impact on the supply of high quality TV shows. And if Death Valley could be persuaded to become part of Nevada, international tourism would not have to take a hit either.
Will you snowflakes stop bringing up Hillary every time you get upset over something as irrelevant as a stupid sign on a wall that nobody pays any attention to anyway? And I thought you were already reprogrammed to hate a new woman who dares to think for herself anyway, i.e. Nancy? Plus I also thought the silly posts were meant to be in the “Politics” section, not the “Economics” section.
The epidemic of cancer started about 100 years ago, with the advent of modern living. It’s caused by all of the toxins that we are exposed to in our food, water, pharmaceuticals etc. Eating organic food and avoiding chemicals as much as possible will contribute greatly to a long healthy life.
(Note that I am a physician that practices natural medicine.)
Anyone who has been to California knows that those warning stickers are everywhere and no one pays them any attention.
Careful Mish. We have 134,000 homeless here in California already. I’d swag that number to double if all the lawyers milking our Prop 65 scam were suddenly dumped in the street.
“living in Illinois” Too funny!!
As I understand it, there are 26 known carcinogens in coffee. Nevertheless, it is also true that on average, coffee drinkers live longer than non-coffee drinkers. It seems to have a neuroprotective effect, and coffee drinkers have less Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and heart disease, and also a lower rate of suicide, according to a 30 year study of 208,000 medical professionals. The study found that in total, coffee drinkers were 15% less likely to die in any given year than non-coffee drinkers. It seems that in addition to carcinogens, coffee contains compounds that help regulate sugar, act as anti-oxidents, and anti-inflammatories. Note that if someone is using coffee so as to avoid sleep, the coffee won’t prevent the damage; this only applies to those who live a healthy lifestyle that also includes some coffee.
Another fun fact, when we first discovered fire and started cooking food, the meat was very carcinogenic to ol’ australopithecus. The ability to survive cooked meat was a big selection pressure on early man. It should be noted that some Californian judges may not have caught up with the rest of us evolutionarily speaking.
I also hear that bad jeans can cause cancer so be sure to avoid denim.
My mother is 92. Lives in her own home by herself. Still drives. Takes care of the yard. So I listen to her whenever she gives me health advice. She told me years ago to avoid coffee (and red meat). Everyone she knew who drank a lot of coffee died of cancer at a relatively young age. So maybe there’s more to this than government oversight.
It also applies to roasts and grilled foods. In fact any cooking process that can cause charring can produce Acrylamide, even if no actual charring is present.
Much more onerously than exactly what particular silly inanity some judge “decides” on, is the fact that judges have any more influence over what people can and cannot do than any random drug addicted hobo washed up under a freeway bridge. If labelling coffee is not explicitly enumerated as one of the limited powers of government, nor specifically mentioned in the Law as dragged down from Mount Sinai, it simply is no business of government whatsoever. Under any circumstance. Even if Starbucks should start selling the finest Russian café-au-polonium.
As an aside, one small sign of the infinite wisdom of God, was that he had Moses write the Law on stone tablets. Very effectively putting reasonable limits on how much of the stuff Moses could bring with him. If only the US Federal courts, along with various state courts, were thusly limited in how much “law” they could dream up to harass people with: You have to be able to carry stone tablets containing the stuff, down from a mountain, all by yourself. Or you can take your so called “law,” break your back in the attempt, shut up and go stuff it.
In a world where plastic is the new lead, coffee is the least of our worries. The world is swimming in carcinogens, inflammatory dietary practices and pollution in general. This of course will solve the problem of an aging population and pension affordability issues because such environmental negligence could inevitably reduce life expectancy below the official retirement age within a few decades.
Just more California nuttiness. Yes, coffee contains so much acrylamide that if you drink 8,375 cups of coffee per day for 935 years you will consume a sufficient amount of acrylamide to create a 0.15% chance that you will get cancer of the brain.
This blog might also cause cancer. You need a popup warning.
Mish, best post to date 🙂