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 65ºC, 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 60ºC. “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.
Good news for coffee
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 Organisation (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.
Some like it (very) hot
In places such as China, Iran, Turkey and South America, tea or mate is traditionally drunk at about 70ºC, 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 65-70ºC boosted esophageal tumours in mice and rats.
Source: www.yahoo.com
