It specifically pointed out the range of bitter, herbal infused teas common in China, Iran and South America, which are consumed at temperatures above 70 degrees Celsius, or 160 Fahrenheit. “What matters is the temperature”.
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National Coffee Association (NCA) president Bill Murray said: ” This finding is great news and highly significant for coffee drinkers and confirms evidence from an avalanche of studies by highly respected and independent scientists”. More than 150 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee were consumed globally in 2014, according to the International Coffee Organization.
“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 has reached at the conclusions after carrying out a detailed review of over 1,000 scientific studies in humans and animals. In fact, the hot flash was released along with news that they’re taking coffee off their list of carcinogens.
Gulping down anything very hot – over 65°C (150F) – including water, coffee, tea and other beverages – is linked to the disease, according The World Health Organisation’s cancer agency.
Here is everything you need to know about link between hot drinks and cancer.
This was based on inadequate evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of drinking cold or warm mate and inadequate evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of cold mate as a drinking liquid, it added.
In a conference call with reporters, officials were unable to quantify the risk – “We can’t put a number on it at this stage”, they said – but said that it appears that the higher the temperature of the drink the higher the risk.
“Mate is not only prepared very hot, but drunk through a metal straw that delivers it directly into the throat”, IARC researcher Dana Loomis told the Guardian.
However, studies have shown people who drink more coffee have lower rates of liver and endometrial cancers. We will be carrying out further research analysis into hot beverages in the future.
Extremely hot drinks might damage the cells in the esophagus enough to sometimes cause cancer, the group said. Men eating mostly a Western diet were found to have 2.5 times the risk of dying from prostate cancer.
‘However, the majority of oesophageal cancers occur in parts of Asia, South America, and East Africa, where regularly drinking very hot beverages is common and where the reasons for the high incidence of this cancer are not as well understood’. “There seems to be an effect of temperature – 65C is quite hot”.
The agency is finally joining other major research organizations in those findings.
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Keep in mind that the results are based on a limited body of evidence so the link between temperature and cancer is not conclusive.
