In California, Where Cancer Warnings Abound, Coffee Is Next in Line
wsj.com
wsj.com
If I see a warning, it could mean that there are harmful, odorless chemicals being emitted by some manufacturing process. Or it could mean I'm near a parking facility. Or it could mean they're serving alcohol somewhere in the venue. There's a huge difference between those three, but the warning posted is identical.
They're worse than useless because they actively desensitize people to actionable information by overloading them with unactionable information.
If they wanted sediment, it would be cheaper to just add some of the actual fruit sediment they already have from earlier in the juicing process, rather than purchasing another ingredient.
Are you sure it isn't used for the opposite reason? Silicon Dioxide (silica) can be used as a suspending agent, so seems like it may have been added to prevent the natural sediment from collecting at the bottom.
I've seen it on everything from food to juices and hammers to cars.
The running joke about my friends is "I'm sure glad I don't live in California or all this stuff would give me cancer"
"Should we warn people if cancer-causing chemicals are used in the construction of a building?"
Sure. I mean, that makes sense, right? However, the net aggregate of these (often conflicting) propositions is extremely counterproductive.
I usually refer people to https://spurvoterguide.org/ (even if you don't agree point-by-point, it's a sensible baseline across everything) - often things that look sensible on the face of it are really impractical.
Asked people what they were about/referring to, and no one could actually tell me!
Coffee and cancer risk: a summary overview.
Abstract We reviewed available evidence on coffee drinking and the risk of all cancers and selected cancers updated to May 2016. Coffee consumption is not associated with overall cancer risk. A meta-analysis reported a pooled relative risk (RR) for an increment of 1 cup of coffee/day of 1.00 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.99-1.01] for all cancers. Coffee drinking is associated with a reduced risk of liver cancer. A meta-analysis of cohort studies found an RR for an increment of consumption of 1 cup/day of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.81-0.90) for liver cancer and a favorable effect on liver enzymes and cirrhosis. Another meta-analysis showed an inverse relation for endometrial cancer risk, with an RR of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.88-0.96) for an increment of 1 cup/day. A possible decreased risk was found in some studies for oral/pharyngeal cancer and for advanced prostate cancer. Although data are mixed, overall, there seems to be some favorable effect of coffee drinking on colorectal cancer in case-control studies, in the absence of a consistent relation in cohort studies. For bladder cancer, the results are not consistent; however, any possible direct association is not dose and duration related, and might depend on a residual confounding effect of smoking. A few studies suggest an increased risk of childhood leukemia after maternal coffee drinking during pregnancy, but data are limited and inconsistent. Although the results of studies are mixed, the overall evidence suggests no association of coffee intake with cancers of the stomach, pancreas, lung, breast, ovary, and prostate overall. Data are limited, with RR close to unity for other neoplasms, including those of the esophagus, small intestine, gallbladder and biliary tract, skin, kidney, brain, thyroid, as well as for soft tissue sarcoma and lymphohematopoietic cancer.
Personally, I've enjoyed my coffee for years being aware of its prophylactic effects toward cancer.
The door led to outside. I'm pretty sure the sign was serious.
I sat here and tried to remember the last time I saw this 'causes cancer' sign, and failed. They are actively invisible to me.
So dumb.
"The statute allows any private citizen to sue over an alleged violation. Last year, 681 settlements worth $25.6 million were reported to the California attorney general’s office. Attorneys’ fees and costs made up more than 75% of the total."
This is all you need to know about Prop 65.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(198...
It would probably be more useful if they had some kind of scale of danger, kind of like in the NFPA fire diamond where hazards are rated from 0 to 4. Another alternative could be to label only substances that a typical citizen would not expect to be present in a certain kind of facility (which maybe could be established by having the state perform surveys). For instance, a typical citizen would probably expect jet fuel to be present at an airport.
An article I read about this whole coffee thing mentioned that
"The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment adopted new regulations last year that will require more specific warnings that list the chemical consumers may be exposed to and list a website with more information. Parking garages, for example, will have to post that breathing air there exposes drivers to carbon monoxide and gas and diesel exhaust and warns people not to linger longer than necessary."
(From: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/26/coffee-sold-in-california-co...)
...which should hopefully make the warnings more useful - though I've no idea whether their overall usefulness will outweigh their overall cost.
Makes me laugh when I compare my first work place we had our own irradiation sources plus the required safety officer oh and that experiment we did where the working fluid was moten metal:-)
Not to mention the full service buildings (ie those with compressed air) where the compressed air reservoir was a risk - not to mention the lab where we had a separate fluron release alarm plus staff trained to use breathing apparatus to attempt a rescue with.
And since the law essentially absolves you if you issue such warnings and the warning is so ubiquitous as not to alarm people anymore, well, you might as well slap it on everything.
The rest is just the law of unintended consequences. If everything causes cancer, then all the warnings will just be ignored.
Legislators in general have a horrible track record when it comes to understanding relative risk.
the innate tendency of legislators
Like with the Lottery disaster, the Legislature was out of the loop altogether.
No, turns out I'm fine. Well, very likely fine. I just happened to learn something new about California law. The road to hell truly is paved with good intentions.
If only the statists of this world would come to the same conclusion...
Life should not only be longlasting, but also joyful
Literally anything that leads to the need for cells to divide is a cause of cancer (eg smoking -> replace lung cells more often; UV light -> replace skin cells more often; obesity -> more cells overall needing replacement, etc).
It makes zero sense to frame the issue in terms of X causes vs doesn't cause cancer. Instead it is a matter of how much.
An expiration-type system just seems like an invitation to play stupid political bargaining games instead of letting reasonable stuff continue unargued, a la the spending bills in the US Congress.
This was a California Proposition, which means it was citizen driven legislation. As a result, legislators aren't keen to interfere with them. To get rid of it, we're basically going to need another proposition which nullifies the reporting requirement and changes the way legal settlements around Prop 65 are handled.
Companies just slap on the label so they don't get sued by a lawyer who makes a living suing over Prop 65.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(198...
https://ehtrust.org/policy/san-francisco-cell-phone-ordinanc...
Seems like a pretty obvious thing to do. How easy would that be to get on the next election ballot?
Proposition 65, however, actually claims that there's a safety issue. And, to be sure, the chemicals on the list are indeed legitimately unsafe; it's just that the context and the probable dosage or actual level of exposure in many cases makes them largely irrelevant.
I'm like, 90% close to making a bot that just does this for HN submissions.