Another stupid regulation

California’s Proposition 65, enacted in 1986, mandates that businesses with more than 10 employees warn consumers if their products contain chemicals that the state has ruled as carcinogenic. One of these chemicals is acrylamide. If you pump a rat full of huge doses of the stuff, he or she will get cancer. But such a scenario doesn’t come close to approximating real life. We are not rats; we do not drink gallons of acrylamide. In fact, the American Cancer Society reports that acrylamide does not increase the risk of cancer.

What’s more, acrylamide is not an industrial additive. It occurs any time you cook starches at temperatures above 250 degrees. Thus, when you toast bread and roast potatoes, you’re producing acrylamide. In fact, acrylamide is found in about 40 percent of the calories consumed by people in the U.S.

Coffee contains acrylamide and always has. Recently, a superior court judge in California has ruled that coffee sellers must post a cancer warning sign, even though plenty of studies show that coffee is associated with a lower risk of cancer. Among other things, it’s an anti-oxidant. Nevertheless, coffee sellers must knuckle under and post the sign, as we saw the other day at Starbucks.

So—yet another warning sign for us to ignore. Who reads all these warning signs? Do you read the one that pops up on your car console telling you to drive safely (or whatever it says)?  As Dr. Aaron Carroll, a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine says, “Warning labels should be applied when a danger is clear, a danger is large, and a danger is avoidable. …. If Americans slap a label on every substance that has the potential to cause cancer, those labels will stop having meaning.”

That’s for sure. I never did read the sign posted at Starbucks, not even after putting it in this blog post.

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