Coffee causes cancer? Who is the real culprit?

For a while, almost all Chinese and English media reported that coffee may cause cancer. However, most people, including these media, may not know that this suspicion is not based on scientific evidence, but on political and legal manipulation. No matter how much scientific evidence there is, it cannot defeat legal manipulation.

In fact, a non-governmental organization called the Council for Toxic Education and Research filed a lawsuit as early as 2010, asking the California government to force coffee shops to label the warning "coffee may cause cancer."

The original English name of this so-called non-governmental organization is Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT). However, it does not really exist in the "civil society" but only exists in the documents of judicial proceedings.

CERT’s contact address is 401 E Ocean Blvd., Ste. 800, Long Beach, California 90802-4967. The telephone number is 1-877-TOX-TORT.

This address and phone number actually belong to a law firm called Metzger Law Group (the owner is Raphael Metzger).

The specialty of this law group (the way it makes money) is to sue companies (especially the food industry) in California courts, and CERT seems to be the legal entity it created for this type of litigation.

In 1986, California voted to pass Proposition 65, which stipulates that (1) the California state government must maintain and update a list of chemicals known to be carcinogenic or reproductive toxic (the Toxic Substances List), and (2) any company's product that contains any chemical on the Toxic Substances List must label its product as such (for example, "may cause cancer").

As early as 2018, the Toxic List listed nearly 1,000 chemicals, which of course brought unlimited business opportunities to Metzger Law Group.

Once a company is sued, it must prove that its products do not contain a chemical on the list (or that the chemical is not toxic or carcinogenic). For example, coffee producers must prove that the trace amount of acrylamide in coffee does not cause cancer.

If companies want to obtain such proof, they must conduct clinical trials, which are not only very expensive (tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars), but also cannot guarantee that they will obtain indisputable evidence. (You have heard that air can also cause cancer. Fortunately, there is no industry that sells air.)

Therefore, the defendant companies were eventually forced to settle out of court and agree to put toxic or carcinogenic labels on their products.

So, what does Metzger Law Group get?

According to Bloomberg, there were 760 out-of-court settlements in 2017 alone in cases triggered by Proposition 65, with defendant companies paying a total of $30 million in settlement fees, 72% of which was paid to lawyers.

According to Bloomberg, Metzger Law Group will receive millions of dollars from the coffee case.

So, now we know who is the driving force behind the cancer-causing effect of coffee.

Does this sound like buying a bunch of products online under the guise of fighting counterfeiting, and then paying ten times the price for picking out the words of the merchant? It's just that this pusher is much more powerful than these scattered soldiers.

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