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150,000 Cups of Starbucks Coffee
This bike is for sale on Amazon.
If you read the product description, you see:
Safety Warning: this product may contain a chemical or chemicals known to the state of California to be a carcinogen and cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Proposition 65 was a California initiative adopted in 1986 by a 63% to 37% margin. It was enacted as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.
Besides restricting toxic discharges, it mandates that:
No person in the course of doing business shall knowingly and intentionally expose any individual to a chemical known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity without first giving clear and reasonable warning to such individual, except as provided in Section 25249.10.
Note that no quantity is specified. Any measurable quantity counts.
More than 900 chemicals now figure on the 22-page list of “chemicals known to the State to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity” mandated by Proposition 65.
These warnings raise many problems. They impose costs on businesses and, thus, on consumers.
They accustom people to believe and depend on the state’s judgement, to behave like children; or else they blur warnings of real dangers under a flood of irrelevant ones, and people learn to ignore them all.
Now, coffee may have to carry the same warning:
A lawsuit first filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2010 by the nonprofit Council for Education and Research on Toxics targets several companies that make or sell coffee, including Starbucks, 7-Eleven and BP.
The suit alleges that the defendants “failed to provide clear and reasonable warning” that drinking coffee could expose people to acrylamide.
If the suit is successful, the signs would need to be clearly posted at store counters or on walls where someone could easily see them when making a purchase.
What is Acrylamide? From cancer.org:
Acrylamide is formed when certain starchy foods are cooked above about 250° F.
Cooking at high temperatures causes a chemical reaction between certain sugars and an amino acid (asparagine) in the food.
Foods such as French fries and potato chips seem to have the highest levels of acrylamide.
A meta-study considering the effects of Acrylamide:
A majority of the studies reported no statistically significant association between dietary acrylamide intake and various cancers, and few studies reported increased risk for renal, endometrial, and ovarian cancers; however, the exposure assessment has been inadequate leading to potential misclassification or underestimation of exposure.
Future studies with improved dietary acrylamide exposure assessment are encouraged.
How much acrylamide does coffee contain? A 2013 study found:
The highest mean acrylamide concentrations were found in coffee substitutes (818 pg/kg) followed by instant coffee (358 μg/kg) and then roasted coffee (179 μg/kg).
One single cup of coffee (160 ml) delivered on average from 0.45 μg acrylamide in roasted coffee to 3.21 μg in coffee substitutes.
For a 60kg person who drinks three cups a day, that works out to:
- 0.0225-0.16 μg acrylamide per kg body weight
How much acrylamide does it take to cause cancer? From a 2-year-long 2012 study on rats (abbreviated):
Groups of 48 male and 48 female rats were administered acrylamide for 2 years.
Concentrations resulted in an average daily consumption of approximately 0.33, 0.66, 1.32, and 2.71 mg acrylamide per kg body weight in male rats and 0.44, 0.88, 1.84, and 4.02 mg acrylamide per kg body weight in female rats.
Acrylamide had no effect upon the survival of male F344/N rats.
The smallest dose of acrylamide given to the rats was .33 mg per kg body weight. That is 330 μg per kg body weight.
From the same study, with mice:
Groups of 48 male and 48 female mice were administered acrylamide for 2 years.
Concentrations resulted in average daily consumption of approximately 1.04, 2.20, 4.11, and 8.93 mg acrylamide per kg body weight in male mice and 1.10, 2.23, 4.65, and 9.96 mg acrylamide per kg body weight in female mice.
Acrylamide caused dose-related decreasing trends in survival in mice, with survival being significantly decreased in male mice administered 0.70 mM acrylamide and female mice given 0.35 and 0.70 mM acrylamide.
Acrylamide caused only sporadic changes in body weight in mice, with the magnitude of the change never exceeding 6% of the respective control body weight.
The smallest dose of acrylamide given to the mice was 1.1 mg per kg body weight. That is 1100 μg per kg body weight.
So the studies on rats used the equivalent of 45,000 cups of Starbucks coffee per day.
The studies on mice used the equivalent of almost 150,000 cups of Starbucks coffee per day.
Additional epidemiologic studies in which acrylamide adduct or metabolite levels are serially measured in the same individuals over time (longitudinal cohorts) are needed to help determine whether dietary acrylamide intakes are associated with increased cancer risks in people.
Homework:
- How much will it cost to force coffeeshops to warn their customers that coffee is known to cause cancer?
- How much would it cost to do more studies on the effects of acrylamide?
- If french fries and potato chips have the highest levels of acrylamide, are they labeled as being significantly more dangerous than coffee?
To resolve a suit by the state attorney general, the maker of Kentucky Fried Chicken agreed Tuesday to tell its California customers that its fried or baked potatoes contain a suspected carcinogen.
[updated 22 Feb., 2018] Thirteen Californian coffee firms agree to warning labels over the presence of acrylamide.
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