Why California Coffee Causes Cancer
Coffee is the latest substance to receive a warning that it contains a chemical “known to the state of California to cause cancer.” (The chemical, acrylamide, is formed when beans are roasted.) But this is a legal term, not purely scientific.
The law that goes into effect is State Ordinance 65, a 1986 vote initiative that may have been conceived as an awareness raising action. (One of its authors, David Rowe, told Newsweek that his supporters did not expect him to pass; “it was more to draw attention to some of the government’s failures with toxic chemicals.”)
Products must have a warning if they contain chemicals on the state’s list . Chemicals are often listed if they have been identified as causing cancer, reproductive harm, or birth defects by another body such as the World Health Organization or the FDA. Here the state explains their methods .
But many of the chemicals on the list are not known to other organizations as the cause of cancer. The World Health Organization, for example, considers acrylamide a “likely” cause of cancer. This does not mean that they know it causes cancer in humans, but there is evidence that it causes cancer in rodents.
Should you worry about acrylamide?
Acrylamide forms part of the reaction that makes food brown and toasty. In coffee, it is formed when the beans are roasted. Once cooked, toast and fries also contain acrylamide. It seems to appear whenever food with carbohydrates and protein – usually plant foods – is cooked over high heat.
The National Cancer Institute notes that humans process the chemical differently than rodents, and that human studies have failed to find a link between acrylamide and cancer.
The FDA has a long fact sheet on acrylamide in foods , but it boils down to this :
Should I stop eating fried, fried, or baked foods?
No.
While the link to cancer is dubious at best, coffee still deserves a warning in California because acrylamide met the requirements to be on the Prop 65 list and the defendants in a recent lawsuit “did not live up to their burden of proof … that consumption coffee benefits human health, ”the Associated Press said in a statement on the decision .
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to prove that acrylamide does not cause cancer. The state mandates that the warnings apply to chemicals in vanishingly small quantities: the risk level is that which can cause one case of cancer in 100,000 people who consume the product (in this case coffee) every day for 70 years. Dr. David Katz of Yale University wrote in Vice that research to address the issue with such a degree of certainty would have been impossible in reality.
What about coffee?
Despite the fact that the court case concerned acrylamide, it is not the chemical that is important to you and me, but the drink that contains it: coffee. The World Health Organization took coffee off its list of carcinogens in 2016 (although it noted that hot drinks of any kind are risky, but only because of the temperature).
Meanwhile, there has been a lot of controversy about whether coffee is good for us or bad for us in general. So far, the largest studies say this may be beneficial for us ; none of the major analyzes considered this to be particularly dangerous. In general, it’s probably okay.
This article was updated at 5:04 pm to note that humans process acrylamide differently from rodents. Before that we said “differently than animals”, but, yes, people are animals. Thanks,czr .