In other words, awesome. Remember when fnord12's job booked him at a cancer hotel? Well, your cola's a deadly killer and California's calling them out!

Coca-Cola and Pepsi are changing the way they make the caramel colouring used in their drinks as a result of a California law that mandates drinks containing a certain level of carcinogens bear a cancer warning label.

The companies said the changes will be expanded nationally to streamline their manufacturing processes. The changes have already been made for drinks sold in California.

...
A representative for Coca-Cola, Diana Garza-Ciarlante, said the company directed its caramel suppliers to modify their manufacturing processes to reduce the levels of the chemical 4-methylimidazole, which can be formed during the cooking process and as a result may be found in trace amounts in many foods.

"While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning," Garza-Ciarlante said in an email.

The FDA rep mentioned in the article says that a person would have to drink 1,000 cans of soda/day to be affected by the carcinogen, so he doesn't think it's really that big a deal.

Here's the thing - we ingest, inhale, absorb thousands of carcinogens in a day, all in small amounts that individually probably amount to nothing. But combined could be a huge problem. And considering how many people get cancer in a year, i think something has to be responsible. Does anyone not know at least 1 person who has/had cancer? So, yeah, i think everyone should do everything they can to minimize any known carcinogen and for the FDA not to recognize this is infuriating as well as unsurprising. And it's pretty clear that it wouldn't have been all that difficult for Coke and Pepsi to have done this all along. All it took was deciding to do it and letting their manufacturers know. Again, who's surprised they only bothered because they didn't want to have to put a cancer warning label on their products?

As a bonus, here's an article about why you should stop eating bacon. HA HA.....no, really. They want you to stop eating bacon.