No, WEF Didn't Advocate For Drinking Only 2-3 Cups of Coffee Per Year

No such remark was made by at the recent panel discussion held by the World Economic Forum.

Fact-check: Fake news about coffee consumption allegedly shared by the World Economic Forum is going viral on social media as real.

(Photo: The Quint)

A screenshot is going viral on social media which shows a report with a headline that reads, "WEF Declares War on Coffee: ‘No More Than 2 or 3 Cups Each Per Year’.

It also carries an image of Hubert Keller, a senior managing partner at Swiss bank Lombard Odier speaking at a panel discussion held by the World Economic Forum.

An archive can be seen here.

(Source: X/Screenshot)

(Similar archives can be seen here and here.)

What's the truth?: This report was published by The People's Voice, an American website, notorious for posting fake or misleading information.

• Neither Keller has made any such statement about coffee consumption nor has the WEF shared anything about it on its official website.

How did we find out the truth?: We performed a relevant keyword search and found the same report that can be seen in the viral screenshots.

• This was published by The People’s Voice on 22 January.

• This website has been listed as "fake news website" by several fact-checks and studies.

• The report carried a post from X (formerly Twitter) which showed a snippet of Keller's speech from the recent panel discussion.

• However, it did not show him specify a limited consumption of coffee beverage.

We checked the panel discussion: We visited WEF's official website and found the longer version of this panel discussion.

At 26:25 timestamp, Keller gets asked about the coffee's impact of environment to which he responds saying,

"Coffee is really interesting because you have the nature dimension of coffee and then you have the economics of coffee, the value chain side of coffee. On the nature side, basically the coffee that we all drink, emits between 15 to 20 tons of CO₂ per ton of coffee, so we should all know that. This is, every time we drink coffee we are basically putting CO₂ into the atmosphere. The other reason, most of the coffee plantation, most of the coffee is produced from monoculture and it is also affected by climate change. The quality of these nature assets is deteriorating quite rapidly."

Hubert Keller

• He further also suggests transforming the monoculture coffee assets to a regenerative agroforestry model.

• Nowhere does he mention about consuming only two to three coffee cups every year, as claimed.

• We also checked WEF's website for any press release about the claim but found none.

We also found a disclaimer on The People’s Voice's website which clearly mentions that the information that they post can be inaccurate.

This screenshot is from the website.

(Source: website/screenshot)

How much coffee can be consumed per day?: According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), healthy adults can consume 400 milligrams a day which is about four or five cups of coffee.

• They mention that this amount does not generally associated with dangerous, negative effects.

• "However, there is wide variation in both how sensitive people are to the effects of caffeine and how fast they metabolize it," FDA states.

Conclusion: Fake news about coffee consumption allegedly shared by the World Economic Forum is going viral on social media as real.

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