Caffeine Relief! WHO Says Coffee Not a Potential Carcinogen But Hot Drinks Still Dangerous
WHO Says Coffee Is Safe To Drink, Only If It's Not Too Hot
Coffee will no longer be part of the list of possible carcinogens as the World Health Organization (WHO) has downgraded its classification, saying that there is not enough proof to show a link to the deadly disease.
However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) also recently announced that drinking "very hot" beverages of any kind can potentially increase cancer risk, citing countries like China, Iraq, and those in South America, where teas are traditionally drunk at very high temperatures. Still, experts conclude that there is inadequate evidence to suggest that coffee can cause cancer.
Owen Yang, an epidemiologist at Oxford University but is not part of the current IARC group said, "I'm not really sure why coffee was in a higher category in the first place. The best evidence available suggests that coffee does not raise the cancer risk."
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Hot Beverages May Cause Cancer?
Drinking very hot beverages, however, is a different story altogether. Deputy Head of IARC Dana Loomis shared that they began to look for a possible link between coffee and cancer when they noticed unusually high rates of esophageal cancer in countries who all drink very hot beverages.
He shared that beverages with temperatures from 60 degrees Celsius and above can scald the skin and cause "thermal injury" to the throat. This could eventually lead to tumors. However, the evidence is not enough to conclude that eating very hot food is also risky.
Last year, a panel of scientists from the federal government's 2015 dietary guidelines said that there was "strong evidence" that three to five cups of coffee a day is not harmful and moderate consumption could help reduce chronic disease.
No Need to Worry About Your Coffee Habits
In short, it's time to stop worrying about coffee. Geoffrey Kabat, a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York said, "What the evidence shows overall is that coffee drinking is associated with either reduced risk of several cancers or certainly no clear increase in other cancers.There's a strong signal that this is probably not something that we need to be worrying about."
Statistics show that around 130 million Americans are coffee drinkers with almost 1.6 billion cups of coffee consumed around the world every day. The new report is good news for coffee lover, bean growers and coffee businesses.
