If you missed it, this news article shares that apparently a UN agency shared that if you like your coffee hotter than 150 degrees, it may cause cancer. That sucks for me because I like mine 190 degrees. And if it's cooled down, the taste changes and I don't like it anymore.
According to what I read, it's not just coffee; it's any hot drink hotter than 150 degrees - including tea.
Interesting... but I'm not about to give up my hot, strong, black coffee yet!
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/very-hot-drinks-probably-cause-cancer-un-body-084306984.html
Paris
(AFP) - Very hot drinks probably increase the risk of cancer, a UN
agency said Wednesday, but coffee -- once feared to be a carcinogen --
is safe if enjoyed at "normal" temperatures.
Tea
and mate, a popular South American herbal infusion, may also be harmful
if drunk hotter than 65 degrees Celsius (150 degrees Fahrenheit), the
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reported.
"It
doesn't matter what the liquid is," said epidemiologist Dana Loomis,
who took part in a review of the world's most popular hot beverages.
"What matters is the temperature."
With
more than 1.1 billion cups of coffee consumed around the world every
day, the industry welcomed the beverage's removal from the list of
"possibly cancerogenic" substances.
"Today
we can brew or buy a cup with even more confidence thanks to science,"
said Bill Murray, president of the US-based National Coffee Association.
The
Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee, which closely tracks
research in this field, said coffee is typically consumed below 60 C.
"IARC's
assessment on very hot beverages is therefore not associated with
normal coffee consumption," secretary general Roel Vaessen said in a
statement. The
IARC amassed all the available scientific literature -- more than 1,000
studies -- on cancer and coffee or mate, also popular in the Middle
East.
Both drinks had been classified as "possibly cancerogenic to humans" since 1991, when the last evaluation was done.
But
evidence gathered since then could not link either drink -- at "normal
serving temperature" -- to an elevated cancer risk, said the IARC, an
agency of the UN's World Health Organization (WHO).
For some types of cancer, there are clues that coffee may even be beneficial.
A few studies, the agency said, showed a positive association with a lower risk of cancer of the uterus, liver and breast.
Taken
together, the available data suggested "there is inadequate evidence in
humans for the carcinogenicity of coffee drinking," it concluded.
As
for mate -- typically drunk piping hot -- the IARC found that high
temperature, not the drink itself, was probably behind an observed link
with cancer of the gullet -- the pipe that transports food and fluids
from the throat to the stomach.
Mate is often sipped through a metal straw that delivers the infusion directly to the throat.
"The single study that examined cold mate drinking showed no association with oesophageal cancer," the agency said.
This prompted the reviewers to look at research into cancer and hot beverages other than mate.
In
places such as China, Iran, Turkey and South America, tea or mate is
traditionally drunk at about 70 C, as are milky teas in parts of Africa
and central Asia. Many of these regions have elevated gullet cancer
rates.
The data pointed to "significantly increased relative risks for drinking very hot tea and very hot beverages," the agency found.
And in lab studies, water at 65-70 C boosted oesophageal tumours in mice and rats.
The analysis concluded that "very hot" beverages were "probably cancerogenic to humans".
Partly due to a lack of research, the IARC could not make any finding for drinking very hot water.
"It is too speculative at this point," Loomis told journalists prior to the report's release.
The
research had taken account of lifestyle factors that could have skewed
the data, such as participants' alcohol or tobacco use -- high risk
factors for oesophageal cancer.
The analysis does not measure the degree of risk associated with drinking very hot tea or coffee.
According
to the WHO, cancer of the food pipe accounts for about 400,000 deaths
out of eight million total cancer deaths every year.
Outside
experts pointed out that most people in Europe and the United States
contracted a different type of oesophageal cancer to those in Asia and
South America.
"Besides,
most people in the UK drink tea with milk, which lowers the temperature
of the drink to a safe level," Tim Underwood, a professor in surgery at
the University of Southampton, said via the Science Media Centre.
For
Colin Berry, a pathologist from the Queen Mary University of London,
the report said nothing about how many hot drinks would have to be
consumed to raise cancer risk.
"Without
knowing what exposure and for what time, the information does not give
you any useful information about which group might be at risk of
what..." he said.
