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Doctors Group Sues California for Failing to Add Processed Meat to Cancer List
- web_ 6y agoSomeone draw the line for me, when does personal responsibility for one’s own health lead to labeling everything a carcinogen?
- GoOnThenDoTell 6y agoWhy 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
- web_ 6y agoI 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?
- thedevilslawyer 6y agoI guess it's that should not remove the gloves when you're working with them?
- web_ 6y agoAs if anyone would. My point is we cannot legislate around reckless or stupid people. It’s an exercise in futility.
- alilsumpinditto 6y agoEverything isn't a carcinogen. Carcinogens are carcinogens, and they absolutely should be labeled when used.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoWe need to stop breathing. Fund Govt interventions to create new Human metabolic pathways https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6646012/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6646012/
- rblatz 6y agoWalking 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.
- teej 6y agoDon’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.
- eplanit 6y agoMany (Californians) disparage the notion of individual responsibility, and see things as collective concerns.
- umvi 6y agoIn 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.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoAnd 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?
- komali2 6y agoDevil'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.
- Danieru 6y agoNo, it says "known to California". Just treat it like you would the wild ramblings of a crazy man. California is best treated as such.
- sizzle 6y agoWhen I see that in a garage it reminds me to not stick around and inhale combustion engine fumes longer than I need to.
- mathraki 6y agoI 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.
- mindfulhack 6y agoEducation 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.
- mathraki 6y agoA 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.
- war1025 6y agoI 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.
- perl4ever 6y agoI 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?
- userbinator 6y agoThe state of California contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoProp 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.
- koolba 6y agoThey 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- whereistimbo 6y agoIf I'm not mistaken Pure H20 is dangerous to drink?
- spfzero 6y agoIn high quantities it can be fatal.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoProp 65 shouldn’t be amended, it should be appealed.
- taurath 6y agoIts really a joke at this point. When everything is actually potentially cancerous, what matters is HOW MUCH.
- Kednicma 6y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
- Google234 6y agoWow, do they know that there is a decent correlation with almost every food and cancer? https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat-causes-cancer/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat-causes-ca... Very good post on this topic, the literature is very chaotic.
- rhinoceraptor 6y agoIt’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.
- TillE 6y agoI 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.
- thereisnospork 6y agoThis 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.
- goodluckchuck 6y agoAnd carcinogens aren’t limited to molecules. Heat, friction, time, etc. also cause cancer.
- jkinudsjknds 6y agoI think it's pretty reasonable to say that unprocessed meat is just an animal cut up into pieces, while processed meat is everything else (e.g. almost everything in a supermarket). Describing food via chemicals only isn't especially useful or easy to parse.
- ip26 6y agoIt'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.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoDoes celery ship with the warning/all the vegetables that contain nitrates?
- aaron695 6y agoMy 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.
- metaphor 6y agoWorth 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 https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr240_E.pdf [2] https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list
- jsperson 6y agoThe problem with dumb rules is that you have to be consistently dumb.
- jennyyang 6y agoDoes this include bacon etc that are nitrate and nitrate-free? I would think uncured processed meats wouldn't be the same, would it?
- madbutcher 6y agoThe problem isn’t processed meats. It’s Nitrates added to meat. That’s the vegan lobby paying for that shit.
- ergwwrt 6y agoWill 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..
- dundarious 6y agoI 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-the-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat 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.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago> alcohol only seemed good for you because we mis-categorized sick quitters as tee-totalers Is this actually true, or just speculation?
- dundarious 6y agoIt 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/17478320/. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25670722/ 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.
- nigrioid 6y ago"Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine" is an animal rights group in disguise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicians_Committee_for_Responsible_Medicine#Relationship_with_animal_rights_groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicians_Committee_for_Respo...