California’s Coffee Cancer Warnings Are Actually Nothing To Freak Out About

Unsplash/Nathan Dumlao

By now, you’ve probably seen a bunch of headlines screaming about California’s recent ruling that coffee must come with cancer warnings. And we’re going to guess that you might not have delved deeper than those few words and immediately thought, “Oh shit, I need to stop drinking coffee, like, right now.” But instead of dropping java like a bad habit, hear us loud and clear when we say it’s not worth giving up the good stuff just yet.

On Thursday, March 29, a California judge ruled that all coffee companies — not just massive, corporate chains like Starbucks — need to provide cancer warning labels for products sold within state lines. This harsh decision was due to how acrylamide, a byproduct of the coffee roasting process, has previously led to genetic mutations and cancer in rodents. However, this is one of those times when research on rats and research on humans doesn’t quite look the same.

In fact, studies show that humans don’t react to acrylamide to the degree that our four-legged friends do. We absorb and metabolize the substance differently. Even the National Cancer Institute asserts that dietary acrylamide (as opposed to acrylamide inhaled from the air) isn’t a cancer risk for humans.

Unsplash/Nathan Dumlao

The real issue here is that the state of California has strict regulations on this substance. It requires that all manufacturers disclose how much acrylamide exists in their products, revealing how much of a risk it poses and, therefore, determining whether a warning label is necessary. And because certain coffee roasters (including Starbucks) hadn’t provided that kind of information up front, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Elihu M. Berle ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to say the coffee beans weren’t risky. AKA, since coffee roasters can’t prove that the beans don’t cause cancer, they require a “just in case” warning label.

In a statement on behalf of the American Institute for Cancer Research, Harvard professor Dr. Walter Willlet said, “It is really unfortunate because most of the human studies published so far have failed to find links between acrylamide and different types of cancer. We have looked at coffee, acrylamide intake, and acrylamide blood levels, and there is no hint of increased cancer risk, and in fact, we have only found health benefits of coffee per se.”

So maybe instead of swearing off our coffee habits, we should look into the other parts of our world that produce acrylamide in amounts and forms that are proven harmful. Sorry, judge, but we’re going to side with science on this one.