California now warns all residents that a cup of joe might cause cancer, but scientists aren't so sure.
Researchers who've studied coffee drinkers for years think that those people probably aren't at any higher risk of getting cancer. Instead, caffeine addicts may actively lower their risk of developing some kinds of cancers, including oral, prostate, and liver cancer.
But those findings didn't stop a California judge from recently ruling that coffee might be associated with a risk of cancer because it contains a tiny dose of a chemical called acrylamide. The compound can form when food is cooked at high temperatures, through processes like frying, baking and roasting. Acrylamide has been linked to cancer in mice and rats when it's put in their drinking water, but only in very high doses.
Acrylamide is in all kinds of cooked food we regularly eat, like french fries, potato chips, cookies, and cereal. There's no evidence yet that the amount of acrylamide in a cup of coffee has any detrimental health effects. In fact, you'd have to drink in thousands of times the amount of acrylamide in a cup of coffee to get to those levels. It's much more likely that acrylamide in cigarettes could be worrisome for people.
Still, places like Starbucks (pictured above) have started pinning up signs to comply with the new California regulation.