Study says coffee is bad for you. Study says coffee is good for you. Now, court says coffee can cause cancer?
There have been an array of opinions on coffee over the years. The latest comes as a court in California, United States, ruled that coffee sellers across the state have to carry a cancer warning label. This is due to a chemical present in coffee called acrylamide which has been previously linked to cancer. It’s produced when coffee beans are roasted.
Sounds scary, right? Well, health experts say you shouldn’t be that worried. Here’s why.
California keeps a list of chemicals that can possibly cause cancer and acrylamide was added to it in 1990.
Eight years ago, a non-profit filed a lawsuit against coffee companies over this chemical’s presence in coffee.
Interestingly, potato chip makers did the former when the non-profit sued them as well for the same chemical years ago.
The coffee industry, led by Starbucks Corp, said the level of the chemical in coffee is safe and any risks are outweighed by benefits. The court ruled against them since they failed to offer proof that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health.
William Murray, President and CEO of National Coffee Association (US), has said that the presence of acrylamide in coffee “is not in doubt” but stressed that the levels “are minuscule.”
Coffee is one beverage that has been studied extensively by experts. And in the recent years, concerns over coffee have eased, with many studies saying it can even offer health benefits.
However, it added that drinking very hot beverages can be cancerous as it burns the esophagus. There was no relation to any chemicals, just the hot nature of the beverages.
The Associated Press (AP) quoted Dr Edward Giovannucci, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health as saying:
The study which linked the chemical acrylamide to cancer was done on animals, by giving them high levels of acrylamide in drinking water. But people and rodents absorb the chemical at different rates and metabolise it differently, so its relevance to human health is unknown.
So, no one knows what levels are safe or risky for people.
Food and Drug Administration tests of acrylamide levels found they ranged from 175 to 351 parts per billion (a measure of concentration for a contaminant) for six brands of coffee tested.
Dr Bruce Y Lee of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was quoted by AP as saying:
Bottom line is that if you like your coffee on and off, you should be absolutely fine. But excess of anything isn’t all that great. International guidelines say you shouldn’t have more than three cups of coffee a day. So it’s safe to say you should moderate your intake for a healthy lifestyle.
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