Doctors Group Sues California for Failing to Add Processed Meat to Cancer List | Hacker News Reader

Doctors Group Sues California for Failing to Add Processed Meat to Cancer List

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72 pointswhereistimbo80 comments

Prop 65 should be amended to set a minimum bar for meaningfully cancerous things, otherwise, all things are labelled cancerous and the warning has no meaning.

The problem with California's proposition system is that any modification to a proposition requires another direct-democracy vote to modify it in any way.

Pretty much the only way to get a proposition onto the ballot is through concerted and expensive political activity by special interests.

So the proposition that we vote on, which gets passed by 50% + 1 vote, is often extremely confusing and there is no room for debate on whether it was well crafted law, and no easy way to modify when bugs in the law are discovered.

> The problem with California's proposition system is that any modification to a proposition requires another direct-democracy vote to modify it in any way.

That's not entirely true. The norm is that amending either an initiative statute or a constitutional amendment requires a further referendum. However, in the case of initiative statutes, it is possible for the text of the initiative statute to grant the Legislature the power to amend the statute without a further referendum. Indeed, if you look at the text of 1986's Proposition 65, section 7 provides the California Legislature the right to amend the proposition without a further referendum, provided that (a) the amendment furthers the purpose of the proposition (as given in section 1) and (b) the amendment is passed by a two-thirds vote in each house. (It also requires the Governor's signature, but a two-thirds vote is a veto-proof majority anyway.) And, in actual fact, the California Legislature has used this power at least once, in 2003, to amend the Proposition 65 text without further public vote.

(If there was any controversy about whether an amendment, passed by two-thirds vote in each house, met the requirement to "further the purpose" of Proposition 65, that would be a matter for the Supreme Court of California to determine.)

Even with your example, I'd say it's still strictly true that a proposition can not be modified without another direct democratic vote. In your example, even as the legislature performs legislation and the proposition allows, the proposition is unchanged and unchangeable by the legislature.

And the cases where a proposition can be meaningfully changed or adjusted by the legislature is vanishingly small.

> In your example, even as the legislature performs legislation and the proposition allows, the proposition is unchanged and unchangeable by the legislature.

California Constitution, Article II section 10(c) says "The Legislature may amend or repeal a referendum statute. The Legislature may amend or repeal an initiative statute by another statute that becomes effective only when approved by the electors unless the initiative statute permits amendment or repeal without the electors’ approval" [1]

So California's constitution is very clear, the Legislature can amend and repeal initiative statutes (of which 1986 Proposition 65 was one). The only question is whether the Legislature's amending/repealing legislation needs approval by the voters at the next election to become effective, and that question is determined by the text of the initiative statute itself. 1986 Proposition 65 imposes a two-thirds majority requirement and a requirement that the amendment further the same purposes in order to skip another public vote; other initiative statutes have different requirements, yet others require another vote for all amendments.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

IDK, I walk into a store and I don't see warnings on every item. Hyperbole is understandable, but mostly relative to states with zero warnings...zero warning of cancer-causing substances...hmm.

Personally I've noticed that I tend to look past the items with labels. I don't like to buy them. So the the labels seem to do something, at least as a data point.

In that case, does the labeled item situation protect me from cancer more than the no-label same-items I see in another state? I have to wonder...Personally I think I'd rather know. Maybe the label sizing can be made adjustable based on contents, but it's not a terrible start vs. no warning at all.

You don't see warnings on every item because nobody has bothered to do the stupid tests yet.

Anything will "cause cancer" if your idea of causality is an observation of cancer in a small-N, high dose uncontrolled study in inbred rodents. Prop 65 doesn't bother to incorporate basic toxicology - dose and exposure need not be considered.

If you drink coffee, you should know that has acrylamide in it. If you regularly consume 100,000x the dose from a cup of coffee, then you'll be at risk of developing cancer. But, your coffee shop needs to display a Prop 65 warning because CA's legislative warriors encouraging the toxicological equivalent of denying evolution; denying that the dose makes the poison.

> Anything will "cause cancer" if your idea of causality is an observation of cancer in a small-N, high dose uncontrolled study in inbred rodents

Is this a specific study? If so please link it so we can get on the same page. I think specifics ought to help in a discussion of this sort, in which swings between polarities like "overblown warnings" and "no warnings whatsoever" are a risk. Either polar end seems to come with big downsides.

Regarding coffee, what I'm reading is:

- A judge in LA required a warning

- The state regulators stepped in and made a clear exemption for coffee after this requirement by the judge

- No coffee warning is required now

Not so?

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-coffee-cancer-warning...

I've seen these warnings on the menu at Hobee's and no one could tell me what ingredient or dish was bring referred to. I've seen these warnings all over the rental car facility at Mineral San Jose Airport, especially the elevators. But you can't see them until you're in them. It's not hyperbole - these warnings are just slapped on all sorts of general stuff just to cover someone's ass.

I've been in a home improvement store, looking for garden tools, and every option says it causes cancer, but doesn't say specifically what. So there is no non-cancer option, and no information on what the issue is and if it is important. And this is in NY, not CA.

Maybe colour coded based on how carcinogenic the worst component is?

Also to say which component is carcinogenic so people can make semi-educated decisions.

Those generic "California says we have to say that something this might be bad, mkay?" stickers undermine the health warning for some seriously nasty chemicals.

I've also seen real safety information covered and obscured by generic prop65 stickers, which is even worse.

They should save businesses and people the trouble and just list the three or four things that don’t cause cancer. Pure H20, N2, and not sure what else.

If I'm not mistaken Pure H20 is dangerous to drink?

In high quantities it can be fatal.

If the WHO and the study linked in the article are to be believed, processed meats would exceed any reasonable bar for meaningfully cancerous.

I think what would have an even better effect is to make overuse of the warning illegal. As of now you could put that warning on everything, and that's what a lot of people will do because they're risk-averse.

I think the cancer-causing substances should be right on the warning label.

It has gotten ridiculous.

Prop 65 shouldn’t be amended, it should be appealed.

Its really a joke at this point. When everything is actually potentially cancerous, what matters is HOW MUCH.

I think that you're thinking of poisons; the central slogan of toxicology is "the dose makes the poison" [0]. Carcinogens, chemicals which aggravate the chance of cancer, follow different rules; usually DNA damage is occurring.

Some very specific viruses are carcinogenic; not all viruses are. Similarly, some very specific molecules are carcinogenic, but not every substance is carcinogenic in sufficient quantities. An obvious counterexample is water, which is toxic in large amounts but not carcinogenic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

I was in CA last year and surprised to see Prop 65 warnings outside every coffee shop because apparently Coffee "may" cause cancer.

It's time for CA to take a step back and stop pretending its citizens are toddlers. People can make their own decisions.

Meantime, organizations like this doctor group go around collecting tax-deductible donations, potentially state/federal grants and paying full time staff.

Waste of resources on so many levels.

WhenI turn into the parking lot at the commercial development where I work, there is a prop 65 warning sign; one on every street entrance. There are many buildings and companies there. They seem like relatively expensive signs, but they provide zero actionable information. Is it in fact my building that is cancerous? Some other business? Should I quit my job? The only thing I’ve ever done with these warnings is ignore them. I don’t feel educated, I just feel tired of them.

Trusting people to make smart decisions when provided with the right information is in fact the goal of Prop 65, because it simply require information to be immediately accessible at the point of sale.

A government that does not trust its citizens to make decisions removes decision making abilities. Like welding shut doors to keep people inside during COVID.

You write of a seemingly rogue CA treating its citizens as toddlers but remember that Prop 65 was a ballot initiative which passed with 63% of the popular vote.

Roasted coffee has acrylamide

So the whole does this negate coffee's touted "antioxidant" benefits?

You're right, but Californians embrace the Nanny State, unfortunately. It's sad.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar with unsubstantive comments. That has bad effects, whichever direction your views point in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is any sort of government intervention considered "nanny state"? Prop65 is as not-nannystate as you can get, considering it doesn't try to ban the products or even tax them.

Prop 65 was passed in 1986. Most Californians today didn't vote on it.

So you really don't know what current Californians do or do not embrace.

Education or information is not control or nannying. Decision != informed decision.

I think any regulation that at minimum benefits consumers when it's hardly anything for corporations to add to their existing labelling is good for society and a great allocation of resources.

This is different to the forced wearing seatbelts when driving, which genuinely forces the restriction of one's physical freedom, and yet benefits no one else but you (within the scope of your own decisions) if you have a car accident.

Mere information, backed by science, is good.

A lot of commonplace stuff can cause harm above a certain dosage. Which is partially why Prop 65 is failing.

99% of things in Prop 65 are fine in moderation. And the 1% that isn't (I would love to be warned of that myself) - well, it's lost among everything else.

Right. Obviously if they put the sign on nothing, no information would be communicated. And the same if they put it on "50% of things" (defined however you like) because everyone knows the median thing isn't a real cancer risk. Maybe it could communicate the breaking of some threshold, but not a meaningful one.

To be truly informative, binary cancer warnings should be rare -- they should appear near a threshold where reasonable people are likely to be swayed by them (but not certain to be swayed by them -- at that point we're probably labeling too few things.)

But enough about binary labels, though. They should have to put figures on them: "Scientists believe that the cancer risk of this cup of coffee is statistically expected to decrease your lifespan by 5 minutes, plus or minus a day, with 95% confidence."

I think my favorite Prop 65 item is my broom, which apparently is cancer causing.

Really no idea what would be in it that is worth being worried about.

I got a rake like that. There were no non-cancer rakes for sale.

I could only think maybe there is something used to assemble it with lead in it?

The issue isn't that the regulation is providing education. It's that the state mandates everyone put idiotic signs that are obviously meaningless everywhere.

If the state wanted to be useful they should maintain a useful and easy to understand list of common substances and explain in simple terms exactly what the risk is.

More creation, less control of people for no benefit.

OK, thanks for the education. That makes sense. Didn't know that. I do not live in CA.

But where should we draw the line and balance the scales of helping or promoting human health (including education, which can save lives), restricting businesses who don't care about human health, and allowing citizens to have the freedom to be as unhealthy as they want (which I'll agree should be a human right)?

With cigarettes, the most alarming label messaging doesn't seem to stop its most determined users from enjoying them. Was a fierce cultural war fought against that regulation? IIRC, yes. (From a documentary.)

One factor here seems to be a war for freedom of diet and lifestyle, extending to the desire to not even have to see messages that tell you your lifestyle may be unhealthy for you (or your children), even if the science is clear.

I agree that education and information isn't nannying, but the Prop 65 warnings are so broad that they're useless.

What information are you getting?

If there's no mention of dose and the warning is based on substandard, uncontrolled evidence, what are you really learning? That if you repeat a small-N "experiment" enough times with the toxin of our choice, some rodent will develop cancer?

In my opinion prop 65 is ineffective. It's like the boy who cried wolf or tobacco warnings. People just filter them out and ignore them.

And it's only gotten worse over time. Even the garage in my apartment building now says it causes cancer! What am I supposed to do about that?

When I see that in a garage it reminds me to not stick around and inhale combustion engine fumes longer than I need to.

Devil's advocate: pressure your local government to build more bike lanes and public transit so as to nullify the need for you to regularly expose yourself to carbon monoxide.

But I do feel that the cancer warnings are excessive to uselessness.

They’d have to be fully covered bike lanes as sunlight causes cancer.

Not if you wear a hat and shirt, or sunscreen.

I really hate the ambiguity of "processed meat". What does processed mean, and what's the carcinogen? Is frozen uncooked seasoned meat bad?

This is actually a situation where labeling would help, because there's a fair bit of grey area that consumers otherwise need to navigate themselves.

It's a bad label, but as far as I can tell it basically means cured meat preserved with nitrates.

To your specific question, if the meat needs freezing, it's probably not cured and therefore fine.

The current wave, by the way, is to hide the nitrates by using "celery salt". It may come from celery, but it has the exact same effect.

Does celery ship with the warning/all the vegetables that contain nitrates?

1) The nitrates aren't a problem by themselves, they react with compounds in the meat during the curing process to form nitrosamines.

2) Celery powder (sorry, apparently I mixed up the salt and the powder) is concentrated.

>Celery powder (sorry, apparently I mixed up the salt and the powder) is concentrated.

This is still not correct. According to a google search celery naturally contains high levels of nitrate. They harvest the juice and use bacterial culture to convert it to nitrites for use in curing.

Cigarettes create carcinogens through the act of burning them to consume it. Your point?

The WHO's definition from their classification of red meat and processed meat as group 1 carcinogens (from https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/q-a-detail/q-a-on-th...):

What do you consider as processed meat?

Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation. Most processed meats contain pork or beef, but processed meats may also contain other red meats, poultry, offal, or meat by-products such as blood.

Examples of processed meat include hot dogs (frankfurters), ham, sausages, corned beef, and biltong or beef jerky as well as canned meat and meat-based preparations and sauces.

This is such a pet peeve of mine. 'Processed' is not a classification: food is made up of molecules (chemicals), please describe it on those terms[0] /end rant.

[0] w.r.t. its biochemical effects on e.g. the human body. A steak's flavor doesn't need to be couched in terms of its chemistry.

And carcinogens aren’t limited to molecules. Heat, friction, time, etc. also cause cancer.

Worth noting that processed meat here[1]:

> ...refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation.

So this isn't just hot dogs, Spam and the like being targeted. Makes me wonder what cancer rates looked like in times long before refrigeration was commoditized.

TBH, Prop 65 in practice confuses me. For example, I have a jar of pickled red ginger in the fridge that I use for kimbap and such with a Prop 65 warning. Listed ingredients are (in order):

  GINGER
  WATER
  SALT
  ACETIC ACID
  CITRIC ACID
  POTASSIUM SORBATE (PRESERVATIVE)
  FD&C RED NO. 40

When searching the database[2], nothing returns for anything on this disclosed list. I'm clearly missing something here.

[1] https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr240_E.pdf

[2] https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list

I understand that Prop 65 is at best a mixed bag, but it is hardly news that processed meat has been strongly linked to certain common cancers. https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/q-a-detail/q-a-on-th...

The Western diet appears to contain more processed meat than ever, so it seems pretty reasonable to apply the warning in this case, because a lot of people are almost certainly unaware. That this association/warning would irk people so much is surprising. You're still allowed smoke and eat lunch meat every day if you like -- the point is to raise it to the level of a conscious choice to do so in spite of the best evidence on the risk factors. I'm no doctor, so I'm not saying smoking and lunch meats carry equal risks, but they are comparable, and more people should know that.

As for problems with Prop 65, for example, it does seem odd to label coffee as potentially cancerous, simply because acrylamide in the coffee bean roasting process has been linked to cancer, when the balance of evidence shows that drinking 4 cups of _coffee drink_ a day seems to have only positive effects. But who knows, maybe that'll be the new "alcohol only seemed good for you because we mis-categorized sick quitters as tee-totalers, so just eat grapes to get the touted red wine health benefits" and the acrylamide effect hasn't been observed yet.

> alcohol only seemed good for you because we mis-categorized sick quitters as tee-totalers

Is this actually true, or just speculation?

It does appear to be true -- no amount of alcohol is "good for you", based on meta-analyses like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17478320/. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25670722/ provides something of an overview. Mendelian randomization is quite interesting too.

On another note, there's this thing called sci dash hub dot se, which I've never used, but I'm hearing about it more and more.

The state of California contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.

"Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine" is an animal rights group in disguise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicians_Committee_for_Respo...

My understanding with processed meats is it only affects rarer cancers.

The life expectancy change is not worth worrying about. Who cares if a rarer cancer chance increase by 18%.

I care about the fact air pollution(PM 2.5) will most likely kill me and if it changes by 1% that's a big deal.

Plus I dont like air pollution, so are happy to pay for less today, it's also an instant return.

The article said it affects colorectal cancer, which is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in CA.

If you eat deli meat and hotdogs all day every day it will cause problems and probably cancer.

Will not be surprised if that new fake deli meat company called Plant Provisions (the impossible burger of deli meat) has something to do with this..

Does this include bacon etc that are nitrate and nitrate-free? I would think uncured processed meats wouldn't be the same, would it?

Wow, do they know that there is a decent correlation with almost every food and cancer? https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat-causes-ca... Very good post on this topic, the literature is very chaotic.

It’s been documented in studies that 100% of people who have had cancer, drank water at some point in their lives. Case closed, ban DHMO.

Someone draw the line for me, when does personal responsibility for one’s own health lead to labeling everything a carcinogen?

Why would anyone assume that a typically sold food (hot dog, bacon etc) causes cancer?

I only found out by looking at the link just now. That’s how important labeling is

I am an automotive enthusiast. Nearly every fluid or component I buy has a label on it per Prop 65. I have been wearing gloves all along. What’s the intent?

I guess it's that should not remove the gloves when you're working with them?

As if anyone would. My point is we cannot legislate around reckless or stupid people. It’s an exercise in futility.

Everything isn't a carcinogen. Carcinogens are carcinogens, and they absolutely should be labeled when used.

Walking around California there are literally prop 65 warnings everywhere. Some stupidly high percent of products I buy come with a prop 65 warning. It sure feels like everything causes cancer, at least in the state of California. The warnings have lost all meaning and I don’t even live in California. It just makes California look paranoid and stupid.

We need to stop breathing. Fund Govt interventions to create new Human metabolic pathways

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6646012/

Many (Californians) disparage the notion of individual responsibility, and see things as collective concerns.

Don’t need to draw the line. For better or worse, California has already passed prop 65. This is just suing for the law to be enforced.

The problem with dumb rules is that you have to be consistently dumb.

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