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| - On Jan. 11, 2024, the FDA submitted a proposal that would ban several food additives, including methylene chloride, which is widely used to decaffeinate coffee beans. The EPA finalized a ban on the cancer-causing chemical, which is also used in paint removers and industrial cleaners, on April 30, 2024. However, despite what some sources have suggested this ban is not a ban on decaf coffee — there are other ways to produce decaf coffee that do not involve methylene chloride.
At the end of April 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a ban on a chemical known as methylene chloride, sometimes known as dichloromethane, a cancer-causing chemical used in paint thinners and industrial cleaners. Earlier that month, in the state of California, assemblymembers submitted a different bill to ban methylene chloride ... in decaf coffee.
When reporting on the EPA's ban, some outlets connected the chemical's two very different uses and wrote articles suggesting that the United States was attempting to "ban" decaf coffee. Snopes readers wrote to us asking if it was true.
We discovered that while the EPA announced a ban on methylene chloride on April 30, 2024, and the FDA submitted a proposal to ban the chemical as a food additive back in January 2024, there are other ways to decaffeinate coffee without using methylene chloride or other carcinogenic chemicals. As such, we rate this claim False.
If you're still concerned about the potential of carcinogens in your coffee, here's what you need to know:
The goal of a "perfect" decaffeinated coffee is to maintain the taste and aroma of coffee while removing the caffeine. The most common way to do this is a method called the European method or traditional method.
First, the beans are steamed or boiled in order to open the bean's pores. Next, the beans are mixed with an organic solvent that will chemically bond with the caffeine while leaving everything else alone. A second round of steaming or boiling then removes the solvent residue, effectively extracting the caffeine from the coffee bean. After this process, the decaffeinated beans are dried and roasted like normal.
The solvent used in that process has changed over time, but currently, the most common solvent is methylene chloride, the aforementioned carcinogenic chemical.
The FDA does regulate methylene chloride in the decaffeination process. Its latest guidelines state that the chemical must be below 10 parts per million on the surface of coffee beans. But in January 2024, the organization announced a proposal to remove methylene chloride and three other solvents from the list of permitted food additives. As of the writing of this article, methylene chloride has not yet been banned as a food additive.
Assemblymembers in the state of California attempted to ban methylene chloride in decaf coffee in April 2024, but eventually reduced the ban to a requirement that all coffee decaffeinated with methylene chloride to be labeled as such.
The EPA's ban affects "all consumer uses and most industrial and commercial uses," but it was unclear whether that ban could potentially beat the FDA to the punch in terms of decaf coffee. We reached out to the EPA for clarification and will update the story with more information as we receive it.
However, for the decaf drinkers, there's other carcinogen-free methods of decaffeinating coffee: the Swiss Water method and the carbon dioxide method. Oftentimes, these alternative decaf methods are prominently advertised on the packaging.
In the Swiss Water method, the beans are soaked for a few hours to release the chemical compounds inside. The caffeine in that mixture is then removed using an activated charcoal filter before the beans are soaked again to reabsorb the flavor compounds, now sans-caffeine. The carbon dioxide method is similar to the Swiss Water method, but uses baths of compressed carbon dioxide instead of water to release the chemical compounds.
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