No evidence coffee causes cancer

Still, he welcomed the news that coffee would no longer be deemed a possible carcinogen. The drinks qualified as “very hot” in the study are over 149 degrees Fahrenheit or 65 degrees Celsius, temperatures that drinks in America and Europe rarely reach. The study found most of us don’t consume liquids this hot on a regular basis.

The findings were published in The Lancet Oncology on Wednesday.

There’s no conclusive evidence that coffee causes cancer. Studies in places such as China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Turkey, and South America, where tea or mate is traditionally drunk very hot (at about 70 °C), found that the risk of oesophageal cancer increased with the temperature at which the beverage was drunk.

The decision to reclassify coffee is a major victory for the industry, which has been aggressively lobbying for such an action.

“This gets the word out for more people to be aware that coffee is a healthy beverage and that it’s part of a healthy diet”, National Coffee Association President Bill Murray said. The new US recommendations, officially issued in January, say that up to five eight-ounce cups a day is fine.

Timothy Caulfield, researcher at University of Alberta who was not involved in the study, deemed the recent research another example of “flip-flopping of nutrition science”. He said there wasn’t enough data to suggest if eating very hot food might also be risky.

The IARC initially declared that consumption of coffee and yerba mate – a highly caffeinated tea widely drunk in South America – might cause cancer in 1991.

The WHO’s new assessment aligns with the American Institute for Cancer Research, which also lists coffee as a beverage that may protect against endometrial and liver cancers. Well, it may be because there have been more than 500 studies on the dark beverage’s risks and benefits over the last six years.

So you can drink your coffee with peace of mind. The study may serve as a warning to the general public but mainly to give policymakers a lead on cancer-causing beverages. If I am not wrong, coffee is best prepared at around 85 degree C. On the other hand tea is often prepared in freshly boiling water, but tea leaves are required to be steeped in this water for a variable period of 2 to 5 minutes before they impart their flavour to the concoction.

The coffee issue is also far from definitively resolved. For example, IARC has classified tobacco smoking as carcinogenic to humans, but that classification does not indicate the increase in risk for each cigarette smoked. “Some people just can’t tolerate it”, Marilyn Cornelis, a Northwestern medical school professor, said at the time.