Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 306 - Coffee Carcinogen Scare

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

Dr Steve discusses the recent coffee scare in California, adult plantar warts, DNA conspiracy theories, genetic relationships, blood in the splooge and more!   stuff.doctorsteve.com simplyherbals.net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What did the panther say at the poker party? I'd be lying if I said I was a cheetah. You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, Riotcast.com. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got subolivirus stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible wounds. I want to take my brain out

and plastic with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill for all my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want to requiem for my disease. So I'm Beijing, Dr. Steve.

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and it's a, you know, it's a buck 99 a month. If you really, you know, whatever, you could do it for one month, download everything and then just quit. And that's fine, too. But anything that you can do helps us. There's no question about that. All right. Let's get right to it. There has been a lot of furor in the news media regarding what's going on in California regarding

coffee. So this is from CNN. California coffee shops may soon be forced to warn customers about a possible cancer risk linked to their morning jolt of Java. The state keeps a list of chemicals it considers possible causes of cancer, and one of them acrylamide is created when coffee beans are roasted. A lawsuit first filed in Los Angeles Superior Court 2010 by the Nonprofit Counsel for Education and Research on Toxics target several companies that, make or sell coffee, including Starbucks, 7-Eleven, and BP. The suit alleges that the defendants failed to provide clear and reasonable warning that drinking coffee could expose people to acrylamide.

The court documents state that under California safe drinking water and toxic enforcement act of 1986, also known as Proposition 65, businesses must give customers a clear and reasonable warning about the presence of agents that affect health, and these stores failed to do so. In addition to paying fines, the lawsuit wants companies to post warnings about acrylamide and an explanation about the potential risks of drinking coffee. If the suit's successful, the signs would need to be clearly posted at store counters are on walls where someone could easily see them when making a purchase.

The whole coffee is it good for you, is it bad for you thing, has been in the medical literature on and off for years. And it is true that when you... roast coffee beans, a small amount of this acrylamide is produced. Guess what? It's a slightly less, depending on the bean and how you do it, than what's in French fries. So there's lots of cooking and heat producing food processes that produce acrylamide. And the dose that are required appear to be much, much higher than what is produced when you do coffee beans. But the law says if you know it's there, you have to alert people.

So, you know, it doesn't necessarily say coffee causes cancer. What they're saying is we have this list of toxins or carcinogens that if they're in your food, we have to warn you. Well, it's not just going to have to be coffee. It's going to have to be a lot of other things. If they're going to use this standard that any amount that's present must be listed because there's going to be a whole lot of other food manufacturers that are going to be pissed about this. Coffee's been studied over the years. Research has shown to provide several health benefits, including lowering your risk of early death. It may reduce your risk of heart disease, multiple sclerosis, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, and even some cancers.

But a review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization found that drinking very hot beverages was probably carcinogenic to humans due to burns of the esophagus. And there was no relation to the chemical acrylamide. You know, don't gulp boiling hot coffee. That's insane. And according to their research, hot water would do the same thing. Tea, any other hot things, hot toddies, I guess.

Acrylamide, now I'm back to the CNN article. In addition to coffee, acrylamide can be found in potatoes and baked goods like crackers, bread, cookies, breakfast cereal, canned black olives, and prune juice. So if you want to have a nice tasty bowel movement, and you use prune, and you use prune. Coon juice, you're also exposed to a small amount of this acrylamide. Its presence is not always labeled, and it is a component of tobacco smoke, and people are exposed to substantially more acrylamide from tobacco smoke than from food. Let's see here. In 2002, the International Agency for Research in Cancer classified acrylamide is a group 2A carcinogen

for humans based on studies done in animals. Studies done in humans have found no statistically significant association between dietary acrylamide intake and various cancers. And this was a 2014 review. Let's see here. Okay. Even the study showing cancer links between acrylamide in rats and mice use doses 1,000 to 100,000 times higher than the usual amounts on a weight basis than humans are exposed to through dietary sources. And humans are also thought to absorb acrylamide at different rates and to metabolize it differently than rodents. So there you go.

So I found this other article that I wanted to read to you, and this is 2017. And because look, I used to have these drug reps that would come see me and they'd say, well, our cholesterol medicine lowers LDL by a certain amount. and therefore it should lower heart attack and stroke. And it's like, well, but you didn't show that because, you know, you need to do a head-to-head study against the gold standard. Oh, well, we could never do that. We could never do that. There's no sense in it. If you bring down the LDL, you bring down heart attack and stroke.

Well, it turns out that there's another medication that you can bring low-density lipoprotein or bad cholesterol down with. and it's called Zetia. And when you decrease it at about the same level as you do with statin drug, you don't get the same decrease in a heart attack and stroke. At least they have not been able to demonstrate that. So it's not just, the point is not that Zeti is a bad drug or statins are good drugs. That's not the point. The point is the endpoint should not be some intermediate step.

In other words, our endpoint shouldn't be decreasing LDL. Our endpoint should be decreasing heart attack and stroke. And I would tell these reps, if you had a drug that tripled someone's bad cholesterol, made it 900. And but you could show that it decreased heart attack and stroke. I'd write it because my interest is not in reducing LDL. My interest is in reducing heart attack and stroke. Likewise with this. My interest is not is acrylamide present is it does coffee cause harm.

That's what we're really interested in. So I'm wrestling these papers. This is a study from Mayo Clinic proceedings. This is not some bullshit open access journal. Not that all open access journals are bullshit, but I'm just saying. This is not a bullshit journal. It's from 2017. And the title is association between caffeine intake and all cause.

and cause specific mortality. In other words, they're going to look at just mortality in general without looking at what people died from, not heart attack, cancer, any of that, just how many people die who take caffeine every day and how many people die who don't? Okay. This is not necessarily coffee. This was caffeine, but still very interesting. So they had 17,594 participants. The mean, let me see, follow-up was 6.5 plus or minus three years. And compared to those who had caffeine intake of less than 10 milligrams per day,

confidence intervals for all-cause mortality were significantly lower in participants with a caffeine intake of 10 to 99 and 200 or more. So a similar association was observed in participants who consumed less than one cup of coffee per week. And the – let me see. What are they – oh, the hazard ratio. Okay, it was lowest in those with a caffeine intake of 100 to 199 milligrams per day. There was no association between caffeine intake and cardiovascular mortality, whereas the hazard ratios for non-cardiovascular mortality were significantly lower in those with caffeine intake of 10 to 99 milligrams per day. Oh, and 200 or more.

So anyway, what they decided was moderate caffeine intake was associated with a decreased risk of all-caused mortality regardless of the presence or absence of coffee consumption. consumption. How about that? Regardless of the presence or absence of coffee consumption. So whether they drank coffee to get their caffeine or not didn't seem to make any difference, really, but an increased amount of caffeine led to decreased mortality rate. So these numbers, again, are going to be small out of that group. Only a small number of people died in both groups, but there was a statistically significant difference in the group that. that had more caffeine in their body. So very interesting.

That's what I'm really interested in. Now I want to see one of these on coffee, coffee itself. And if we can show that coffee decreases all-cause mortality, then the fact that there is a suspected carcinogen in coffee really doesn't matter, does it? Because the end result is decreased death, which is what we're really interested in. Okay. All right. Well, anyway, let's see.

Here, uh-oh. Let's take some phone calls. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. I got a question. Wait, what did you say, Ronnie B? Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Well, isn't that the truth?

All right. In about a, what appears to be a planter ward, my fiancé and I have showered on occasion, and she had it first. and I'd say it's now been about a year and a half or so, and we've tried different methods to get rid of it. I think the Dr. Scholl's freezing thing that you're supposed to apply and then it's supposed to kind of fall off, that didn't work, and then we used the, I think it's some sort of saline acid

or something that you put on it. That also just doesn't appear to work, And in previous times, when I've had plantar warts, they've come off fairly easily or at least within a couple weeks. But again, just not kind of sure what it is or what can be done to get rid of it. It's just something you have to kind of just let it run its course. I'm not sure how long it's supposed to last. Like I said, it's already been. Okay.

Well, plantar warts. So these are warts on the bottom of the sole of the foot. And they are caused by human papilloma virus. and the damn virus gets in there and starts to reproduce and then walls itself off. So if you ever looked at one of these, they're surrounded by sort of a capsule of very dense skin that is a very dense keratin. Keratin, same stuff that your skin is made out of also your hair and stuff like that. It's sort of the body's plastic. So it's like they're walled off with plastic and they recruit their own blood cell or little cap.

to keep the cells alive so that they can reproduce. Because as you know, viruses have no life on their own. They have to hijack the nuclei of other cells to make more copies of themselves. So they'll just sit in there and just fiddle around and keep going for quite some time. And it's hard for the immune system to get in there and kill them. most adults don't have plantar warts a matter of fact most children who have them will not have them when they're adults i had them really bad when i was a kid finally in college somebody scooped a couple of them out my immune system caught whiff of them and went and killed the rest

and i've my the bottom of my feet have been clear ever since and one of the things you want to do is avoid doing so much damage when you scoop these things out that you cause scarring because if you can get the body's immune system to kill the HPV viral pericles, then the foot will heal up and it'll be nice and smooth. But if you've been cutting around and digging and causing scarring, now you're going to always be walking kind of on these scars and it feels like you're walking on a rock or something. So I would not do this myself. I don't think the over-the-counter stuff works for the really deep-seated planter wards,

maybe the little small seed ones that you see right on the surface that I haven't dug in very well. But the real big, deep ones with the big sort of keratotic covering, you got to see a podiatrist for those. Your primary care, if they did some podiatric training, may be able to handle it, but I'm just telling you, my experience has been podiatrists are the best at these. They get in there, dig them out, and a good podiatrist can do. a beautiful job of coring these things out. And once you do that, your immune system may, as I said, get a whiff of those viral proteins and then go, what the fuck are you doing here?

And then get in there and kill the rest of them. So the body can clear HPV. We just don't have a good test that shows that it did. But with plantar warts, you can tell because you don't have any warts anymore. So that's sort of your marker of success. So see a podiatrist and get these taken care of because you don't have to live that way. All right. Hey, Dr. Steven, so I was listening to the episode of Evie, the Night Nurse,

and you guys were talking about that DNA testing they do, and you send it in. I had a friend that did that, you know, and got his results. I always felt like you're just given more than the Social Security away. you're giving a DNA to somebody. Now, my question is, as a doctor's perspective, would that be something that you would be kind of scared to do because it's out there, now they've got your DNA? Well, that's an interesting question. The question is, what are they going to do with it? You know, if we were using DNA to secure loans or to validate credit card transactions,

then yes, I would be very worried about it. But the thing is, anytime anybody does a blood draw, they can get your DNA. If they can get a follicle of your hair, they can get your DNA. It's very easy to get a hold of people's DNA. It's just, what are we going to do with it? Those reports just come back and say, well, you're 10% sub-Saharan Africa, and you're 30% northern European, possibly of, you know, Swiss descent or whatever, you know. And there really isn't anything they can get from that that they can use.

So I'm not worried about it. One thing I would like to do, I would like to do an experiment where we get the same person gives a sample to three different places and see if they all come back the same. If they do, then I'll feel like they're really doing something. If they come back all over the place, that would be very revealing to me. that, because I'm always a little skeptical when they can say, you know, your descendants are from Portugal or whatever. I'm just, I'm skeptical, but I would like to try that. And if I ever do a television show, sort of a medical myth busters type thing, and, you know, we've talked about that in the past, that's one of the experiments I would love to do. That and repeating the vodka tampon.

And if you guys don't know what the vodka tampon is, we did a controlled trial here in the studio, and it's way, way, way back when double vasectomy Todd was still here. So you'll have to get a premium subscription to listen to that one. But it was pretty interesting. Also that and the ass crack challenge, which I would probably repeat on television as well. And just how different flatus sounded when it was no longer muffled by hair in my ass crass. It was quite, quite astounding. And I believe that one is in the archives as called the, just called the ass crack challenge. Anyway, all right.

Let me see if I can explain my question here. How does a pill work? Let's say I've got a sprained ankle. The doctor gives me something for inflammation. Does that area essentially, for lack of a better brief, put out a helpful. pointed signs. So when you take a pill, the brain knows there's entries or tries to route the medicine that away? Or does the medicine just kind of float through your system from your earlobes to your toes? And if it happens to find something, it can help. It does it that

away. Yep. It's the latter, except in one one condition. So, and this is sometimes the objection I have to taking pills. For example, if someone has, as pain on the first knuckle of their hand, why take a pill that's going to go to the tip of their toes, to their scrotum, to their ass crack, to their ear, to their, well, okay, how many parts of the body can I name? Just to get medicine to that one knuckle, you know, to that joint, why not put something topical there, if you have it. And we do make topical medications that are good for those kinds of pains.

So, but, so yeah, there, you know, that anti-inflammatory is going to just float around and it will have action wherever there are receptors to accept that action. It could be everywhere in the body, but you'll only notice it because you only had pain in the knuckle or in the tooth or something like that. Now, there are things called monoclonal antibodies. and these also just float around when you take them. And these are, what they are is actually immune molecules, or they're molecules that the immune system uses.

And a monoclonal antibody is a single antibody that will target a specific protein. So it could be a cancer basement membrane or it could be a protein that is found in cancer cells that recruits blood vessels, stuff like that. And those will float around and go everywhere again, but will only attach where that protein is found. So they're a little bit more targeted in that regard. But, yeah, there's no internal routing that the brain goes, oh, this guy took ibuprofen.

I'm going to route all of that to that first knuckle. There's no mechanism for that. But anyway, so excellent question. Hey, Dr. Steve, I just had a random question. Google wasn't really helping me out. My ex-wife and I had a child together. We separated. She's now pregnant from her boyfriend, and my girlfriend is pregnant from me, hopefully. And my question is, I was just kind of wondering, like, will our son, my ex-wife and my son be, like, equally related to her new baby and my new baby? Or, like, does the dad have? have or like oh that's really interesting the dad's a baby going to be more related to him or i don't know if it makes any sense i don't know how to really work this but okay no that's a great question so the child that you had with your ex-wife will be the um half brother of any child that they have together and any child that you have with your new person and uh he he

That child has 50% of your genes and 50% of hers. Now, you know, they're not expressed exactly 50%. There may be dominant recessive genes and, you know, there's a complex mix when you start mixing. But the genetic material is half yours and half hers. So the her new lava will have no. DNA in common with the child that you had with her, but he will produce 50% of the genetic material for the child they have together.

And your wife will, okay, so your wife, your ex-wife, will give 50% of the genes to the new kid, and she gave 50% of the genes to the kid that you have now. So there will be no difference in the amount of genetic material. of hers that's in those. And same thing with you. You gave 50% of the genetic material in the kid that you have now and in the kid that you're having with your new paramour. So, but anyway, but the kid will be half-brother to both of those children, if that makes sense.

All right. Uh-oh. There we go. Yeah. The other day, I was, you know, taking care of it. I masturbated, and a little bit of blood came out on the first couple shots, kind of had me worried. With the doctors, they told me I should get a prostate exam, and I wasn't really comfortable about going with that,

especially because my doctor had big fingers. Just kind of worried about that. I'm 29 years old. I think that was really something that I had to worry about this age. I'm just curious what you think, I guess. Thank you. Yeah, man. Yeah.

Okay, so he had an episode of what is called hematospirmia, which is usually a distressing symptom for patients causing them to call into radio shows and stuff. but it's often, you know, if you've got a decent primary care physician, they can handle it. It's almost always benign, but you've got to rule out underlying pathology. So this is the same as Dr. Steve's rule for blood in the stool. If you see blood in the semen, the first time it should be worked up. often men who are younger than, say, 40 to 45 years and don't have any risk factors. You don't have a history of cancer, no genetic malformations, any trauma, anything like that.

It usually requires nothing other than reassurance of the patient. Some primary care people or a urologist will put you on an antibiotic because they are assuming that there's an infection there. When you get a little bit older, or if you are sexually promiscuous, then you've got to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. And particularly if you have lower urinary tract symptoms like burning or any of that, or burning when you pee or burning when you ejaculate. Now, if you're older than that, most of the time a prostate check is required.

When it happened to me, they did a cystoscopy. And they're looking for polyps in the urethra and polyps in the part of the bladder that's, or well, in the part of the urethra that's just coming from the bladder where semen is mixed and with sperm and seminal fluid from the seminal vesicles and from the prostate. And they'll check your prostate as well. make sure you don't have a prostate infection again might end up on antibiotics but more of a workup is done in older people like me because I'm an old old piece of shit so so I had to have a little bit more but hematospirmia scary should be evaluated at least the first time and but most of the time is going to be benign all right I'll do one more Steve, Dr. Scott, everybody else.

My name is Ray. I have a question about my shoulder. I listen to the podcast. I'm hoping you can put that on there. A couple years ago, I had a tear in the rotator cuff muscle. It didn't come off either end. The doctor said it was a vertical tear in the muscle itself. I went through the whole PT process, stretching and pulling and everything else, and it seemed to help.

I got most of my strengths back. I had pretty minimal pain. But in the last couple of months, I've had increased. increasing pain, especially when I rotate the arm upwards and back, almost like if I'm trying to do the jumping jack position or reach for something behind my head, I get real significant pain, and when I'm sleeping, I usually sleep on my stomach with my arms up on top of me. I wake up after about two hours, the arm is completely cold and incredible pins and needles

to the point where I'm having real trouble sleeping. You know, I turn over and it gets warm again and I, you know, I don't think I'm losing a pulsing or anything. But I was wondering if there's something I can do as far as maybe something on the Dr. Scott side where I could take something maybe with a stragglers in it or something that help me have this joint pain go away. And or if there's some sort of manipulation or acupuncture or something that might relieve some of this pain and get me back mobility, strength. Well, maybe. I'll, maybe we'll ask this one when Dr. Scott is here. But what I'm concerned about is either recurrent. Okay, so this guy is having pain when he rotates, rotates the shoulder up and back.

So external rotation and what we call abduction. And in getting what you have to do to get into the general. jumping jack position and he has pain that starts to make you think that the rotator cuff is involved there's a you know the if you feel feel the shoulder muscle and if you take go right to the side of your shoulder it's all meaty but then if you work up closer top get up closer to your neck you'll see it turns into bone right well that shoulder muscle doesn't just disappear it goes under that bone. And it's called the acromion process.

And it has to slide, and there's a little, there's tissue in there that kind of lubricates that joint. And if, if you get a little bit of a raggedy edge on that acromion process, when you lift your shoulder up, it can start to strip off cell after cell of muscle tissue until eventually it rips a hole or a tear in that shoulder muscle. that bundle of muscles. And that's called a shoulder impingement syndrome. And, of course, that would certainly be exacerbated by abduction.

In other words, lifting the arm up away from the body and external rotation. In other words, rotating it, you know, outward and backward to attain that position. So that's one possibility. The easiest way to determine whether that is the case is a physical exam by somebody who knows what they're doing, and then maybe an MRI to see what the extent is. If it is just a bursitis of the shoulder, that's pretty easy to diagnose by a skilled diagnostician. They can stick some cortisone under the shoulder, or under the collarbone near the shoulder,

and the pain will just go away. And that requires some skill. I was pretty good at that when I was doing them back in the day. getting it right in the right place so that you're putting it in that little sack of fluid and rather than, uh-oh, well, that's Dr. Scott himself. So I'm going to click, tough shit, asshole, you're late. So, you know, it takes some skill to get it in the fluid sack and not jabbing it into bone or tendon tissue. So, but anybody that's going at that probably has done a few of these and is relatively skilled at doing it.

The third thing, though, that makes me concerned in your case is that you are having numbness and coldness when you move your arm over your head and leave it there. That starts making me think of a thing called thoracic outlet syndrome. There's a thing called vascular thoracic outlet syndrome. And what this is is a disorder that occurs when blood vessels or nerves in the space between the collarbone and the first rib are compressed. It can cause pain in the shoulder and cause pain in the neck and numbness in the fingers in hand. And this can be caused by physical trauma, repetitive injuries, you know, people who have an extra rib, even pregnancy, which probably is not his problem. So sometimes they don't know.

And the vascular thoracic outlet syndrome occurs when one of the more of the veins or arteries under the collarbone are compressed. And that's really about the only thing that would cause a limb to go cold like that. So I would look into that. There's tests that can be done in the office that are simple physical exam type tests that can, that can lead you in the direction of thoracic Outlet Syndrome. If you if you don't know who to go to

for this, start off with your primary care and just tell them that you read somewhere that you heard somewhere that this could be what the problem is. You know, they'll do provocative tests. These are designed to reproduce your symptoms. If they can do that, that kind of confirms it. Then they might do an extra. ray or an ultrasound, particularly if they think that it's vascular, they can do an ultrasound.

You put your arm behind your head, and they watch for a decreased blood flow to that limb. And then just regular imaging like an MRI or angiography may be able to tell, too. A lot of times, physical therapy will take care of it. Anti-inflammatory medications may help as well. And the few rare people will need surgery for this to relieve the pressure. sure. So just get that checked. Call me back. Let me know. You can always email me at Weird Medicine at Riotcast.com.

And I'll try to answer your emails if I can't answer your question. And thanks always go to Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg, Hughes, Anthony, Cumi, Ron Bennington, Fiswantley, who stood fast, supported this show, never goes unappreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel. serious xm channel 103 saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern on demand and other times at Don Wickland's pleasure pleasure until next time check your stupid nuts for lumps quit smoking get off your asses and get some exercise we'll see you in one week for the next edition of weird medicine