They'll be coming for our toast and chips next!
Super Cali goes ballistic, Starbucks is on notice: Expensive milky coffee is something quite cancerous
A California judge has ordered major coffee chains to put a cancer warning on their beverages. Los Angeles Superior Court judge Elihu Berle ruled this week that, under state law, Starbucks and other coffee chains will have to put up a notice that compounds present in coffee can cause cancer. The judge said that, under …
COMMENTS
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Saturday 31st March 2018 09:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Partial Burn
Any plant matter, when partially burnt, evolves a whole slew of not very nice chemicals, the consumption of which is not advised in high doses. Not that you get a high dose from normal foodstuffs, but as they great Iain M Banks said, these things accrue.
From this point of view, smoking pot ain't a whole lot better than smoking tobacco. Both involve inhaling the fumes of partially burnt plant matter, and that's a bad idea. Plus some carbon monoxide too, which isn't great for the health either.
Wait 50 years and there'll be a whole load of cancer ridden pot heads suing the cannabis companies in California, elsewhere.
I can't imagine anyone will be suing Starbucks - I wasn't aware that what they purvey counted as coffee...
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Saturday 31st March 2018 13:31 GMT elgarak1
Re: Partial Burn
Cough,cough... There is a significant difference between tobacco and hemp (pot): Tobacco preferentially absorbs and accumulates a lot of bad substances. Some of those appear in the environment as fallout from in-air nuclear test explosions during the '50s and '60s. In short, modern tobacco has become an alpha-emitter, and smoking tobacco exposes the inside of your lungs to quite a high dosage of alpha-radiation. As far as I am aware, hemp is not particularly radioactive.
Note: One of the big important rules of radiation safety: Never ever let pieces of alpha-emitters enter your body! It's bad, m'kay? OUTSIDE your body they're fine, mostly harmless. But inside, oh boy....
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Sunday 1st April 2018 02:26 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: Partial Burn
Why would anyone do anything with hemp other than make ropes and such? It's not like it has THC like pot (marijuana). The fact that growing hemp is illegal because it looks too much like marijuana to uneducated law enforcement is why it's illegal to grow in the US. Fortunately if the Hemp Farming Act of 2018 is passed that won't be an issue any longer and LEOs will actually have to think before they shoot people.
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Friday 30th March 2018 23:53 GMT bombastic bob
Re: the judge who cried wolf?
this site has a top 10 list of foods high in acrylamide:
https://www.healwithfood.org/list/foods-high-in-acrylamide.php
However, _I_ think it was the DHMO that was causing the cancer, and NOT the acrylamide nor the coffee itself!!!
You KNOW that DHMO is in EVERYTHING, right? It's often found in toxic waste, it's dumped into the air by car exhaust and nuclear power plants, and EVERY CANCER PATIENT has DHMO in their system!
If you don't believe me, check out dhmo.org !!! And get out the word, to everyone, because Henny Penny and Chicken Little think the SKY is FALLING!!!
</sarcasm>
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Saturday 31st March 2018 00:06 GMT Grikath
Re: the judge who cried wolf?
"So either eat your food raw or boiled, "
Wasn't "Boiled to Death" the standard mode of english ...food massacre.. ? As opposed to the scottish "fry it 'till it stops screaming".. ?
Which makes me wonder.. In all those decades I've mastered english, I've never really heard any solid stereotype about the Welsh and Food (other than the sheep thing). Inquiring minds at Beer 'o Clock and a bit...
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Saturday 31st March 2018 13:38 GMT elgarak1
Re: the judge who cried wolf?
I can't help but think that the trial leading to this decision had the wrong export witnesses. There has been a paper some years ago (don't bother me to find it for you) that investigated the stuff. Yes, frying, baking and roasting produces acrylamide. But, in addition, in particular on meat, it also produces enzymes that during digestion prevent the acrylamides to be digested and absorbed by the human body.
In fact, given the recent rules of the EU to not fry fries over a certain temperature: This might reduce the production of acrlamides, but it also reduces the production of said enzymes.
It's entirely unclear whether any of this has an effect on the prevalence of cancer. But it's not enough to just look at the concentration of acrylamides.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 15:25 GMT Swarthy
Re: the judge who cried wolf?
Next Question: How does one put a Prop 65 Warning on air? 'Cause one of the most corrosive, flammable, carcinogenic, and damaging chemicals known to humanity is Oxygen.
I guess, in LA they could just carve it into the smog... but LA should have an exemption, as there isn't much O2 in the air.
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Saturday 31st March 2018 10:43 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: They should put...
Well, yes, that does appear to be the law now.
They should also put warnings on people. Anytime I can smell your breath, it's probably bcause of some volatile organic chemical and in sufficient concentrations that probably isn't good for me.
Of course, a sane law would say the warning is only required when the increase in risk at a location is large enough to cause a reasonable person to start taking precautions. But we aren't going to get *that* law until the stupidity of *this* one is made clear. So start making those T-shirts...
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Monday 2nd April 2018 11:31 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: They should put...
"Its was a rederendum. Lawmakers were obliged to implement it."
Being neither a Californian nor even a US resident, my cursory search for details on this referendum failed. Has anyone got a link showing the turnout and voting numbers? My instinctive feeling is that this is the sort referendum commonly called a "squeaky wheel vote", ie most people either never hear of it or care enough to bother other than those who campaigned for it. The inevitable result being low turnouts but primarily those who vote Yes.
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Monday 2nd April 2018 15:13 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: They should put...
Has anyone got a link showing the turnout and voting numbers?
Prop 65 is unlikely to have significantly affected turnout. I was on the November 1986 ballot, which also featured a race for the state governor.
I haven't found statistics specifically for Prop 65, but some 7.4M people voted for governor. That's a bit low by California standards but not tremendously so.
I'd guess that the vast majority of those people did not abstain from the Prop 65 question, since it was right there on the ballot and once you've gone to the trouble of voting in the first place, why not check something? Educated voters are likely to have an opinion; uneducated ones aren't likely to care whether their vote is productive.
Wikipedia further claims that it passed with a 63% yes vote, though it doesn't provide a source for that statistic.
So if, say, only 10% of people who voted in the gubernatorial race abstained from the Prop 65 question, that's around 4M who voted in favor.
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Monday 2nd April 2018 14:56 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: They should put...
Are there any sane politicians in California for a start? If there are then why don't sane people vote for them or are everyone suffering from an advanced case of the stupids?
However interesting that question might be, it's irrelevant in this case. Proposition 65, like all "propositions" in California law, was a ballot initiative passed by direct vote of the electorate.It wasn't passed by politicians. (Of course some politicians may have voted for it as citizens, but it was not the work of the legislature.)
As is generally the case with "direct democracy" in the US, Prop 65 is largely useless. It's difficult to find a product that does not have a Prop 65 "known to the state of California" warning on it, so they're widely ignored.
In states where they have an effect, ballot initiatives are generally employed by well-funded groups to mobilize the tyranny of the masses to pass some idiotic, counter-productive law. In other states, such as Michigan, they're just a waste of time and effort. (Michigan's constitution prevents ballot initiatives from overriding any law with a spending component, so when an initiative is passed that the legislature doesn't favor, it just writes an overriding bill and tacks some spending measure onto it.)
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Saturday 31st March 2018 16:39 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: They should put...
"But we aren't going to get *that* law until the stupidity of *this* one is made clear. So start making those T-shirts..."
Maybe every coffee shop should put up huge, fluorescent coloured banner warning...
DANGER! CALIFORNIA LAW SAYS COFFEE CAUSES CANCER!!!
That should demonstrate how much notice real people will take of the warning, make the law look more of an Ass than usual and be entirely legal.
I wonder what materials were used in the construction, decoration and furnishing of the court? It's quite likely that some of the materials are emitting at least some level of carcinogens. Should the courthouse have warning signs placed at the entrances?
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Saturday 31st March 2018 14:04 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: They should put...
MH suggested, "They should put... A cancer warning on the state of California..."
Well yes. It is rather sunny there (except San Francisco), and it is well established that the UV rays in sunshine can and actually do cause cancer.
Perhaps the coffee chains could have fun with this; place a Sunshine Cancer warning sign outside.
Sometimes it's easier to push the pendulum a bit further in the direction it's already headed. Judo applied to the law.
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Monday 2nd April 2018 13:46 GMT 2Nick3
Re: They should put...
"A cancer warning on the state of California..."
When you get off a plane in California you are greeted by a sign on the jetway that indicates something along the lines of, "The State of California says that there are cancer causing things beyond this point."
Makes me laugh every time I see it.
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Friday 30th March 2018 20:45 GMT martinusher
Not a big deal
Practically every business has a Proposition 65 notice posted by the entrance. They get put up because even the stuff used to clean the place is potentially cancerous. Nobody takes any notice, they're just background noise. (Its also a handy CYA just in case someone decides to sue because such-and-such gave them cancer......instead of spending big bucks trying to prove a negatice you just point to the sign and say "we told you so".)
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Saturday 31st March 2018 16:11 GMT far2much4me
Re: Not a big deal
Unfortunately, the way Proposition 65 was written (and passed by the stupid voters), was any detectable level of carcinogen requires the warning. As tests have gotten better (as in detecting ppb), it seems practically everything has carcinogens. There was a lawsuit about 20 years ago to require the "organic" markets to post signs because ripe fruit contains several detectable carcinogens. They lost because the judge had some common sense. This time they won. Because the judge is stupid and, you know, big business.
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Friday 30th March 2018 20:45 GMT martinusher
Not a big deal
Practically every business has a Proposition 65 notice posted by the entrance. They get put up because even the stuff used to clean the place is potentially cancerous. Nobody takes any notice, they're just background noise. (Its also a handy CYA just in case someone decides to sue because such-and-such gave them cancer......instead of spending big bucks trying to prove a negative you just point to the sign and say "we told you so".)
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Saturday 31st March 2018 00:00 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Another "Super Cali" headline?
The 3 Stooges would do their schtick any time there was a camera. It was always the same *kinds* of stuff. People still laugh at it, though the jokes were limited and repeated frequently. It became 'expected' and people laughed anyway.
it's a comedy style. I like it. And I live in CALI-FORNICATE-YOU, and think the gummint here has COMPLETELY lost its collective mind. Well, if ALL of the sane people leave, it'll just get worse... and I really don't want to re-incorporate in another state. Still if it gets REALLY bad, Texas looks interesting. Maybe the gulf coast. Hurricanes can't be much worse than earthquakes an leftists trying to run my life!
/me points out that when ALL of "the producers" and the small, startup businesses leave Cali-Fornicate-You, the only people left will be a handfull of overly wealthy tax PAYERS, and a WHOLE LOT of open hands begging for nanny-gummint to FEED and CLOTHE and HOUSE them [and give them freebie medical care, too, and extend their lives, so they can leech off of society for as long as possible and continue to vote for Demo-Rats]
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Monday 2nd April 2018 15:20 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Another "Super Cali" headline?
"Texas looks interesting."
You better be quick, apparently Texas is sinking!
Sure. And like most of the Southwest it's dangerously short on water, too. But that doesn't make it less interesting. Less appealing, perhaps, but not less interesting.
Bacigalupi's The Water Knife is an entertaining look at just how interesting the Southwest as a whole might get. (Those who prefer nonfiction might want to try Cadillac Desert, Reisner's classic history of the region's water troubles, which Bacigalupi references heavily.)
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