Piping Hot Drinks May Lead to Cancer of the Esophagus

By Sondra Forsyth

Drinking piping hot coffee, tea, and the caffeine-infused beverage yerba mate probably causes cancer, the World Health Organization announced on June 2016.

A release from the University of Southern California reports that beverages surpassing 149 degrees Fahrenheit (65 degrees Celsius) may increase the risk of tumors in the esophagus, which resides in the chest area below the throat, according to USC’s Mariana Stern and 22 other scientists from 10 countries. They met at the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, in May 2016 to determine if drinking coffee or other very hot beverages causes cancer.

The release quotes Stern, an associate professor of preventive medicine and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, as saying, “Enjoy your coffee or mate, but make sure it’s not very hot. There is physical evidence that very hot beverages can contribute to cell injury in the esophagus and thus contribute to cancer formation.”

The group scoured more than 1,000 studies on over 20 different types of cancer. 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.

According to the National Coffee Association, coffee waiting to be served should sit at 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit (82-85 degrees Celsius). That’s around the temperature McDonald’s restaurants served coffee before a well-known lawsuit prompted the fast food chain to sell coffee at a temperature of 10 degrees lower – still far above what the researchers consider safe.

In the United States, the average coffee drinking temperature is around 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). The temperature varies between 99-190 degrees Fahrenheit (37-88 degrees Celsius), Stern said.

“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. “Similar associations are seen for other very hot beverages, like tea or coffee.”

Stern and her colleagues noted that drinking yerba mate at very high temperatures – between 150 and right below the boiling point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit (66-100 degrees Celsius) – is common practice in certain countries in South America, including Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.