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 …
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...
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....
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.
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>
"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...
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.
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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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...
"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.
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.
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.)
"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?
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.
"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.
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".)
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.
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".)
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]
"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.)
"Daily Fail headline, where nearly every week they have <insert product here> causes/prevents cancer."
yeah, I go *yawn* every time.
Cyclamates, ONLY tested along with Saccharine, was ALLEGED to cause cancer [since the patent ran out and ANYBODY could make it]. Saccharine tested by itself was ALSO alleged to cause cancer. Connection? And because there's no patent on it, there's no financial incentive to prove that Cyclamates are ok.
Butter (in the 1960s through 1980s) was considered BAD for you, and "polyunsaturate" margarine was considered 'healthy'. Then someone actually managed to get the word out about TRANS-FATS. Not so healthy, right? I like LOTS of butter on EVERYTHING, by the way, but haven't tried 'deep fried butter' yet.
Nobody believed that ulcers were caused by BACTERIA. Everybody said it was "stress" or "acid" or something NOT the truth. Then a brave Australian doctor decided to test his own theory, ON HIMSELF, after which he CURED himself with ANTI-BIOTICS.
The anti-cholesterol fascists are STILL out there doling out unnecessary prescriptions for anti-cholesterol medication, EVEN THOUGH IT OFTEN RESULTS IN DIABETES [particularly in post-menopausal women], and [as far as I can tell] MAY LEAD TO ALTZHEIMER'S [keep in mind, the BRAIN is mostly fat, and cholesterol]. With few exceptions, MOST people don't need this, nor the cocktail of OTHER medications to manage the side effects that MIGHT BE CAUSED by the anti-cholesterol CRAP.
Needless to say, can you REALLY BELIEVE half of what is being said about 'what causes cancer' or 'what food is good/bad for you' etc. etc. etc. ???
And you can extend this to the ridiculous claims about egg shell thinning and DDT, the ONLY chemical known to kill things like BED BUGS [which are coming back, in a rather BAD way].
So yeah, "nearly everything causes cancer". LIFE causes cancer. DHMO causes cancer.
/me runs off, screaming, with my hands in the air
John Lykoudis, a general practitioner in Greece, treated people for peptic ulcer disease with antibiotics, beginning in 1958, long before it was commonly recognized that bacteria were a dominant cause for the disease.[38]
Helicobacter pylori was identified in 1982 by two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall as a causative factor for ulcers.[39] In their original paper, Warren and Marshall contended that most gastric ulcers and gastritis were caused by colonization with this bacterium, not by stress or spicy food as had been assumed before.
In 2005, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Dr. Marshall and his long-time collaborator Dr. Warren "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.
Sister-in-law is a certified, left coast, card carrying Californicator. She absolutely will flip out about this.
Maybe going nuts over every jot and tittle in the press is unhealthy? Whatever happened to eat, drink, and be merry?
I told her that despite eating nothing and thinking only wholesome thoughts... She will eventually die anyways. And it will look really stupid when she's in the hospital dying from absolutely nothing. At least I will know what's going to take me out!
Looking at the following site there appear to be a number of states with childhood vaccination rates lower than CA. CA already has SB277 removing personal and religious belief exemptions - with reports that drug companies donated millions to CA lawmakers before the vaccine debate. Perhaps the publicity around SB277 caused some parents to begin weighing the risks of vaccination against the benefits.
www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/immunizations/Pages/Across-America.aspx
Every time there is an earthquake, flood, mudslide, volcano*, in California -> Californians leave the state in droves, polluting other states with their whackjob ideas/laws. Seen it first-hand in Arizona, which is why I moved further east, but not as far as the coast ;)
*'Volcano' - lost two hours of my life last night to a bad Tommy Lee Jones movie about volcanii in LA.
They require a specific sign designs for restrooms that seems like it was intend to troll the visually impaired. Nearly every sign in the world has a triangle dress shape for women and not a triangle for men. California goes and does the reverse. Apparently the signs were designed by an IT person as well.
...it will either give you cancer, make you fat or make you pregnant.
Shurely not the last one, certainly not in isolation, although If you are putting on all the greens you could be misled into thinking this impossibility was the cause. You could equally wrongly think it was the other impossible one on the triple scorecard.
I remember all the media reporting a couple of ago that eating red meat 3 times a week or more increased your chances of getting colo-rectal cancer by 15%. Not one article said what the odds actually were. Using the CDC's own numbers, it turned out my odds, higher than average because of my age, were between 3%-4% if I ate the "cancerous" foods and still between 3%-4% if I didn't.
I am consistently dismayed at both the quality of research and the abysmal reporting on it. It appears the profession of choice for the credulous, math illiterate and those lacking curiosity is journalism.
Note: Not a dig at ElReg. News sites dedicated to particular field are usually staffed by reporters who work or have worked in the field and have a knowledge and interest in the subject.
Please give me some latitude here on these items because it was a couple of years ago:
Might have been 20%, but I believe it was 15%, might have been processed meat rather than red meat.
One of the reasons to cook food is to kill bacteria that cause some nasty GI diseases. Diseases that if untreated (assuming they can be treated easily) can have a lethality of up to 20%. I think I will take a miniscule risk of cancer versus a more certain risk of death.
Macdonalds did not loose their case because the plaintiff had a good case. They lost it because they arrogantly mishandled it by assuming that facts and common sense carried any weight. The world will, no doubt, regard this as yet another piece of evidence that we can laugh at them. It will be interesting to see if this case was lost more on lawyer activities than actual evidence and reason.
How much coffee does someone have to drink before it makes cancer 1% more likely? Perhaps they are more likely to be crushed by the sacks of coffee beans needed.
Rats and mice get cancer when given amounts 1,000 to 100,000 times greater than a normal human would be exposed to in their diet. Putting this silliness into perspective, you'd have to drink somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 cubic meters (0.0016 Olympic-sized swimming pool) of coffee every day for two weeks to match the same dose given the rodents.
I am wondering why it is news now. The Starbucks on the boardwalk on Mission Beach had a Prop 65 warning placard already as of June of last year..
BTW, there are Prop. 65 warning signs at the entrances to Disneyland as well ... One of my tourist activities was to photograph all the Prop. 65 warning signs we encountered. It's such a silly law that pretty well exemplifies California.
Quote from the Warranty Statement from a recently purchased Buffalo MiniStation:
"WARNING:
This product and its components contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects, or reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling."
1. Is this knowledge confined to the State of California?
2. Would washing one's hands eliminate the risk?
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