Java Lovers, Rejoice: Coffee Doesn’t Pose A Cancer Risk, WHO Panel Says

The researchers also point to studies of tea in Asian countries, including China, that found the risk of esophageal cancer may increase with temperature. This was based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies that showed positive associations between cancer of the oesophagus and drinking very hot beverages.

“We were now able to evaluate more carefully the effect of mate itself from the effect of temperature, and we concluded that the observed links between mate drinking and cancer of the esophagus seem to be largely driven by drinking mate very hot”, Stern said.

In response to the findings, Casey Dunlop, health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “Most people in the UK don’t consume drinks at the temperatures considered in this research, although very hot tea is a popular drink in Middle Eastern and other countries”. In its new evaluation of more than 500 studies, it found that coffee drinking had no carcinogenic effects for cancers of the pancreas, female breast, and prostate.

In reviewing the scientific evidence over the past 25 years since its last analysis on the matter, the World Health Organization concluded that coffee should no longer be considered a carcinogen and that it may actually have positive effects for your body when it comes to two types of cancers – those of the liver and uterus.

Very hot drinks probably cause cancer, an agency of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. The scientists concluded drinking any beverage hotter than 149 degrees Fahrenheit is “probably carcinogenetic to humans”, placing scalding hot drinks in the same category as DDT, frying food at high temperatures, consumption of red meat and the human papillomavirus. “So it’s important for people to become familiar with what temperatures of what the temperatures of the things they are drinking really are”, said Stern, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. The famous lawsuit against McDonald’s by a customer who said she suffered third-degree burns after spilling coffee on herself involved coffee at temperatures of 180 to 190 degrees.

In the United States, the average coffee drinking temperature is around 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius).

However, IARC said it could not prove that coffee was “safe”, only that existing scientific data supports the theory that coffee is unlikely to cause certain cancers.

One word of caution: The agency warns that extremely hot beverages may increase the risk of cancer.

The WHO working group said its new classification was based on a review of more than 1,000 studies in humans and animals. Reduced risks were seen for cancers of the liver and uterine endometrium. Geoffrey Kabat, a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NY said, “What the evidence shows overall is that coffee drinking is associated with either reduced risk of several cancers or certainly no clear increase in other cancers.There’s a strong signal that this is probably not something that we need to be worrying about”.

“To all the tea lovers out there, these new findings don’t mean that you can no longer enjoy hot drinks”.