Study Reveals Why Your Morning Coffee Or Tea Might Need A Minute To Cool Down

A recent study, published Tuesday in the International Journal of Cancer, shed light on why it is important to be careful with how you consume your morning drinks. According to the study, if your daily routine begins with a piping-hot cup of coffee or tea, you might want to give it a few minutes to cool down before taking that first sip. A massive study tracking nearly one million adults in the UK found that drinking extremely hot beverages significantly increases the risk of developing a specific form of esophageal cancer.

It isn't the coffee or tea itself causing harm-it's simply the temperature at which you drink it.

Researchers from Oxford University followed the health records of almost 980,000 adults over more than a decade. Participants reported whether they usually drank their coffee, tea, or other hot beverages "warm," "hot," or "very hot".

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When comparing health outcomes, the findings were stark as they noted that people who drank their beverages "very hot" were more than three times as likely to develop esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) compared to those who drank them warm.

Meanwhile, those who described their drinks as simply "hot" faced a 70% higher risk compared to warm-drinkers.

The study further noted that drinking six or more hot beverages a day boosted the risk by 71%, but the temperature of the liquid remained the primary factor, not the beverage itself.

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma affects the lining of the muscular tube that connects your throat to your stomach.

And the tissue lining your esophagus is delicate. When you regularly swallow extremely hot liquids, it causes microscopic burns and constant irritation to those cells.

Notably, beverage temperature did not raise the risk of adenocarcinoma, another major type of esophageal cancer.

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"This is the largest study to date, and it does really add to the evidence that drinking very hot and hot beverages could increase the risk of this type of cancer," lead study author Keren Papier, a senior nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health, said as quoted by CNN.

This isn't an isolated theory. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer previously designated drinks consumed above 149 degrees F (65 degrees C) as "probably carcinogenic" due to thermal injury.

As per the agency, global cases will rise by more than 50%, to almost a million new cases a year by 2040.