Coffee Sales in California to Come with Cancer Warning

According to a recent legal ruling in California, coffee sellers in California will have to provide a warning to customers that by consuming their coffee, they may possibly be consuming a cancer causing chemical called acrylamide. This warning or notification is required under California's Proposition 65 law, which is also known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, enacted as a ballot initiative in November 1986. The proposition protects the state's drinking water sources from being contaminated with chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm, and requires businesses to inform Californians about exposures to such chemicals. Read more about it here: https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/general-info/acrylamide

Acrylamide is produced during the baking, frying or roasting of certain plant-based foods, particularly starchy foods. It may be present in baked goods, french fries, potato chips, other fried and baked snack foods, roasted grain-based coffee substitutes, roasted asparagus, canned sweet potatoes and pumpkin, canned black olives, roasted nuts, prune juice, breakfast cereals, crackers, cookies, breads, and toast. This ruling on coffee raises a lot of legal, regulatory, compliance, and ethics questions at the very least. Is California's Proposition 65 law becoming so stringent that it is losing sight of its goal, veering off the edge of practicality? Will bakers, fast-food restaurants, canned food companies be next on the list, who will be hit by lawsuits about acrylamide and will have to place warning labels on their products? Where will Proposition 65, "affectionately" known as "Prop 65" or P65 draw the line? Be careful folks, when you fire up that Bar-B-Q this weekend!

Well before this ruling was announced, I was reviewing the Proposition 65 list of toxic products for a project and was struck by the fact that several commonly used everyday products were on the Prop 65 list. I took the liberty of developing the table below listing some of the cancer-causing products per Prop 65 and the toxic ingredients contained in them which caused them to be on the P65 list.

Obviously, this table includes coffee, but Aloe Vera? Folks consume this everyday ingredient in food and drinks, medicine, and cosmetics. Also on the list, a herbal medicine called Goldenroot powder which is consumed for its reported "anti-cancer" properties! The list includes several food dyes such as Citrus Red Number 2 used to color citrus fruits that one can buy at the local grocer, and its listing makes sense because many of these food coloring agents are complex chemical compounds with adverse properties, which, it should be noted is allowed by the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA). This raises another question: is the California agency OEHHA (Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment) responsible for listing chemicals on Prop 65 looking at a different set of scientific data than the FDA, and why is there so little consistency between the work of these agencies? Is OEHHA far ahead of the FDA in research and if so why can't FDA keep up? While answers to some of these questions may be obvious, it raises a huge red flag in the way agencies roll-out regulations that can be misleading and impact the bottom line of small and big business. What about similar state regulatory entities in other states and are people consuming the same products in other states and countries for that matter less safe? From the table above, betel nut and betel "quid" aka as "paan" consumed in South Asian countries as a recreational after-meal treat to "freshen" the mouth is listed as cancer-causing due to the presence of alkaloids and polyphenols that also contain nicotine. Watch out my "paan" chewing friends; beware of the potential risks of consuming these products. Now, listing of marijuana smoke on P65 makes sense, but what does not make sense is that the State of California (which I may remind you also passed Prop 65 in 1986) recently made consumption of recreational marijuana legal in the state from January 1, 2018 by passing Proposition 64. So Proposition 64 makes marijuana consumption legal for recreational use, but Prop 65 in a big irony makes marijuana smoke toxic? Are the consumers of recreational marijuana supposed to hold their breath when enjoying a "bong break"? I am totally for the Precautionary Principle and would rather avoid many of these products out of abundance of caution. Appreciate that California is leading the fight against cancer-causing products but we have to be realistic and make sure laws that have a significant impact on the daily lives of people have a solid grounding in defensible, unbiased, and consistent science. Think about P65 next time you order that salted Chinese fish dish or order that steamy frothy cappuccino! Bon appetite folks!