diary

This may provide some good news for dairy farmers…

Hot drinks probably cause cancer and they should always be left for a few minutes to lower the temperature, or cooled down with milk to avoid disease, the World Health Organisation has warned.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the WHO, said very hot drinks of 65C and over are likely to cause cancer of the oesophagus.

However the panel found there was no evidence that coffee or tea causes cancer and said any link was because of the hot temperature of the drink.

Dr Christopher Wild, director of IARC, said: “These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of oesophageal cancer and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible.”

Experts said that most Britons should not be overly alarmed by the findings.  Recent research published in the journal Burns found that a cup of tea with 10ml of milk cooled to less than 65C in under five minutes.

“It is the very hot temperatures that have been identified as a cancer risk and so, when drinking tea or other hot drinks, just let it cool down for a few minutes”

Dr Rachel Thompson

The Royal Society of Chemistry also recommends drinking tea at 60-65 degrees while Northumbria University found that the perfect drinking temperature of tea – 60C – is achieved six minutes after brewing begins. Most coffee experts recommend that the drink be served between 40 and 60C (120 – 140F).

Casey Dunlop, health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “Most people in the UK don’t consume drinks at the temperatures considered in this research.

“So as long as you let your drink cool down a bit before you drink it, you’re unlikely to be much at risk.”

The research also found that coffee itself was unlikely to cause cancer. In 1991 the IARC linked coffee to bladder cancer, but following the lengthy review, it has now concluded that the evidence has become weakerIn its new evaluation of more than 500 studies, it also found that coffee drinking had no carcinogenic effects for cancers of the pancreas, female breast, and prostate. For more than 20 other cancers, the evidence was inadequate to enable a conclusion to be made.