People who drink more coffee seem to have lower rates of certain cancers, including liver and endometrial cancers. “In other words we should not be anxious about drinking coffee because of any possible risk of cancer”. Experts convened by the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm declared Wednesday that there isn’t enough proof to show that the brew is linked to cancer. So the agency opted to categorize the beverage as “unclassifiable” when it comes to its carcinogenicity.
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“(This) does not show that coffee is certainly safe. but there is less reason for concern today than there was before”, said Dana Loomis, the deputy head of the IARC’s Monograph classification department, at a news conference.
But there’s good news for women.
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.
What if how you like your coffee served each day influenced your risk for cancer? Temperature, not the beverage itself, is the key to what harmful, according to findings based on combing through more than 1,000 studies.
Hence, the categorization of coffee as “unclassifiable”.
Coffee was blacklisted as a possible carcinogen in 1991.
They say coffee is unlikely to be a cause for breast, prostate and pancreas cancer but there was insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion for 20 other cancers. No conclusive evidence was found for drinking maté at temperatures that are not very hot.
“Drinking a cup of tea in under two minutes straight after it was poured was associated with a five-fold higher risk of cancer compared with drinking tea four or more minutes after being poured”. That’s why the most recent U.S. dietary guidelines suggested that drinking three to five cups per day could actually be part of a healthy diet. Consuming very hot beverages, however, could be a risk.
The problem the World Health Organization identified is just that drink temperature seemed to increase the risk of esophageal cancer.
The practice contributed to a study by Iranian scientists published in 2009 in the British Medical Journal linking “very hot tea” to an increased risk of throat cancer.
In a statement given to The Huffington Post UK, study author Mariana Stern, from Keck School of Medicine of USC, added: “Enjoy your coffee or mate, but make sure it’s not very hot”. They focused on the traditional drink mate, a kind of tea that is normally consumed at temperatures above 150 degrees through a metal straw.
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“So as long as you let your drink cool down a bit before you drink it, you’re unlikely to be much at risk”.
