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WHO: Drinking Extremely Hot Coffee, Tea 'Probably' Causes Cancer (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via USA Today: The World Health Organization reports that drinking coffee, tea and other beverages at temperatures hotter than 149 degrees Fahrenheit may lead to cancer of the esophagus. These hot beverages can injure cells in the esophagus and lead to the formation of cancer cells, said Mariana Stern, an associate professor of preventative medicine and urology at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. But scientists did say that if you drink coffee at cooler temperatures, it is not only safe but it may decrease of the risk of liver cancer by 15%, according to research published in Lancet Oncology. Previously, the International Agency for Research on Cancer ruled coffee was a "possible carcinogenic" in 1991. The research involved Stern and 22 other scientists from 10 countries, who examined about 1,000 studies on more than 20 types of cancer.
They used to have Extremely Hot Coffee.
I had a customer some years ago who was an oncologist. He told me that the reason we see so much cancer these days is that we live long enough to get cancer.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So does cold coffee, and steak, and broccoli, and water, and every other fucking thing.
This is like those "Causes Cancer in California" shit all over the place. It's crying wolf and nobody pays attention to any of this anymore.
Given my love of five-alarm chili, I have to suspect that at the other end of the system, things might not go well for me.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Plain and simple. Also wouldn't at all be surprised if they have some sort of political agenda that has nothing to do with people's health and everything with controlling peoples behavior.
definitely causes ice cream headaches.
I'm a weirdo who likes my coffee room temperature. A winner is me.
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I literally have no idea what they're talking about as I don't speak backwardian. Come back when you've learned metric.
For those of us in the real world, 149 degrees Fahrenheit = 65 degrees Celsius.
Before everyone loses their minds, there are a few things one should know about the report:
First, there is still only limited evidence that hot beverages cause cancer, nothing is conclusive.
Second, there's a clear pathway that very hot (scalding) water could increase the rate of cancer, although very slightly. If the water is hot enough it can damage the esophagus and trigger cell regrowth and scar tissue. These conditions are known to be slightly more cancer prone.
Really, these results aren't terribly surprising, but the increase in rate of cancer is so small that the WHO taking notice of it is just supplying media fodder.
More interesting though was that in this same report cancer was removed from the Group 2A possible carcinogens
The non-sensational headline for those of us that don't care for them would read: "Repeatedly damaging the tissue lining the esophagus with very hot liquids probably contributes to an increased chance of that tissue becoming cancerous."
For those of who aren't anti science
That's 608.67 Rankine
If there weren't also benefits to hot drinks. They are pleasant and evolution tends to tie pleasure to desirable traits.
Hah You are just too stupid to adjust your unit scales to suit the problem.
In my new Onocological Temperature system 149 degrees Fahrenheit is 1.0
149F = 65C, guess which unit was used originally?
Oliver.
Cold brewed coffee is not only economical & convenient, it's also got less acidity than hot brewed.
I like mine from TJs - 1 bottle lasts about 1-2 weeks for a small-time drinker like me.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Sorry, but we already have a medical terminology encoding system for use in medical fields like Oncology, and in that system 149 degrees Fahrenheit has been assigned Concept ID 1528951251210529 (for refererence, 149.1 degrees is Concept ID 1528951251210531 and 149.2 degrees is Concept ID 38)
just tell me, again, why I would care what some aging band has to say about coffee?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Celsius' original scale had 100 as freezing and zero as boiling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The human pain threshold for temperature is 106-108F (41-42C). Unless you're a masochist who likes to shotgun boiling hot liquids, so long as you don't get a painful sensation, you're fine. Realize that even if the liquid is much higher than this temperature, so long as you sip small quantities of it, it will rapidly cool to something closer to your body temperature when it enters your mouth. Most folks instinctively do this, because pain sucks.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I want to know how California will label coffee now.
This product is may or may not be know in the State of California to cause cancer
Murderer
The quote from the report is
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
I don't know where they got 149F from, the report says 70C, which is 158F
I'd listen to this WHO guy if I were you all. He's a Doctor, after all.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If they've been looking at it for more than 25 years, and the best they can come up with is still "may" or "probably" cause cancer, then it doesn't.
Tomorrow we'll see another study that will refute this one and say that drinking COLD beverages has a possible relation to cancer...
So goddamn tired of these correlation based studies that prove nothing.... show me an actual cause and effect, ie. if you do X, it will cause Y which will lead to Z.
Spend more time and money to figure out how shit works ffs...
Anything drunk or eaten above 149 F (65 C) is potentially dangerous - not only tea and coffee.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"...drinking coffee, tea and other beverages at temperatures hotter than 149 degrees Fahrenheit may lead to cancer of the esophagus."
That's why I always cool my coffee to 148 degrees before drinking it. Ha ha, suck it, cancer!!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I prefer kelvin for my absolute scales.
149F = 338.1500K
I do find it hard to believe that the WORLD Health Organisation gave their numbers primarily in Fahrenheit.
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When I want coffee, I want it now and I don't want to have to wait for it to cool down either. I don't want it so hot that it burns my mouth and leaves a flap of skin hanging down. So when my coffee is too hot to drink I get a little irritated. I also don't want to have to put ice in my coffee either because watered down coffee is nasty.
I drink hot tea, no milk, no sugar - lashings of the stuff. I happen to have a laser thermometer here so I decided I would find out the comfortable temperature that I start drinking and the time it takes to get there for a 250ml ceramic cup - the kettle is boiling now.
Temperature of ceiling 19C, walls 20C. Windows open, no breeze heater or AC on in my office. 8 seconds from boil to pour.
Now I really like a tea, and I'm usually wanting to drink some as soon as possible, my control is waning and I'm having a sip at:
second sip
third sip - getting perfect now
First gulp - still a bit burny
Perfect!
Joy
two gulps - nice and nice 2/3s done
nom, nom
ok getting close to slurp phase, I moved the cup around
sluuurrppp - ahhhhhhhhhhh!
last gulp - that was nice
I really like a cup of tea and I'll have at least 6 per day, so perhaps that first sip is the one I have to resist or have some cold water. That said, if I'm desperate then my lips or top of my mouth will get burned first - probably different if you have milk and sugar. Now I know.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
They seem to drink hot tea all the time thought out day even when it is hot!
I do find it hard to believe that the WORLD Health Organisation gave their numbers primarily in Fahrenheit.
And, as you're probably implying here, they didn't.
The only place where, as a Yank, I might currently find Fahrenheit more familiar than Celsius are 1) "how hot/cold is it in here/out there?" and 2) "do I have a fever?", just because I'm used to the ranges; living outside Yankland I'd probably pick up the "yow it's {hot,cold} out there!" and "better take it easy and stay in bed today" values pretty quickly.
65C and 149F are both "OK, how hot is that in real-world terms?" values for me; 65C is no more "so what does that mean in real life?" than is 149F. I know the water was 100C/212F at one point (when the teakettle was whistling), but I don't know how hot it was when 1) I took the first "a bit hot, I'll let it cool down" sip, 2) when I actually started drinking it, and 3) right now (although it's probably well below 35C, and perhaps even below 30C, now).
This might be a clue that its a fake article, or that it was not done by a real scientist.
Forcing your body to replicate cells more often leads to a higher chance of a mutation - that couldn't be more obvious. The more times you attempt a clean copy, the more chances for a bad copy. I think this would apply to any case where cells are constantly being damaged and repaired (sunburn).
and I read fark. Sorry man, but come on. Where do I begin? Just because you might live long enough to be exposed to a risk doesn't make the risk go away. My Mom died of lung cancer from cigarettes in her mid-50s. By that logic it's OK to smoke because 100 years ago she would have died in child birth in her 40s. The correct response is to keep identifying and eliminating unnecessary risk factors. Smoking's one. Drinking stupidly hot coffee is probably another. I like it when people tell me these things. With the right drugs I might live happily into my 90s (check out what they're doing with Testosterone & Steroid therapy if you have enough money and if you can get people to stop whining about Athletes doping long enough to loosen the stupid ass regulations).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why would "Nature" (which is not a willful entity) "want" to make sure that eternal life doesn't happen? By the way, when a bacterium divides, or when a sperm (alive) and egg (alive) join, guess what -- they stay alive. The germline cells are, in a very real sense, immortal. They can die by the usual physical means (e.g. getting crushed, eaten, etc...) but are nonetheless the means and result of rejuvenation.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
wait for your coffee to cool, right? In my experience if I'm drinking it that hot it's because it tastes like garbage. The Japanese don't drink Sake warm because of tradition, they drink it warm because cheap Sake tastes better that way.
And there are _lots_ of other good things in life besides junk food and cheap, burnt coffee.
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Do you want to live a life of fun, good food, fun entertainment and hot beverages, then die at 70, or do you want to live a life of measuring everything daily in a state of panic that you might get cancer and then die at 74 - that is, if you don't accidentally walk in front of a bus when you're 40?
Do the fun, good food, entertainment, hot/cold beverages and all that stuff you may die at 70. Agreed.
But how will you die? You will probably die of some medical complication attributed to your lifestyle choices which makes such a hit on your quality of life that death is probably a better option.
Tat Tvam Asi
Missing from the highly biased summary. The WHO actually downgraded the rating for coffee stating that their is no conclusive evidence to suggest drinking coffee causes cancer
Not sure about others but UDP definitely IS stopped by our firewall so saying this isn't prevented by firewalls is just bullshit. I would also not rate this as severe, it is probably important and should be patched in anyones next round of patching but not something you have to go around panicing about in a properly configured network.
65 degrees Celsius. This information is very prominent in the article, I wish it made the /. summary too for slashdot's international readers.
And, as you're probably implying here, they didn't.
Well, I was mostly having a go at Slashdot editors, but yes, that is what I was implying.
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It's not anti-science. It's an American web site. The metric system is just as arbitrary as our units, and many (all?) customary units are now defined in terms of SI units, so shove it.
This was already raised years ago
For fuck's sake, this!
Sounds like a few degrees cooler just for safety factor.
I have one of those instant stick thermometers.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There's already a long suspicion that the correlation between regular consumption of hot yerba mate tea in south america and incidence of esophageal cancer may be causative. It wasn't confirmed back in the days because there were other substances in the tea that might explain the higher incidence of cancer. Now there seems to be confirmation of this suspicion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
reason defies logic
‘65C is no more "so what does that mean in real life?" than is 149F.’ – I live in Europe, where we never use Fahrenheit, and I have got a general idea. Body temperature is about 37 degrees and your pain threshold is about 5 degrees higher than that. 50 degrees is scalding hot, 70 degrees is commonly used for hot tap water and coffee machines.
P.S. Shame on Slashdot for stripping away the degree symbol (AltGr+:).
338.15 Kelvin you worthless imperial fuckwit.
They actually said 65C, in case anyone was wondering why it was a strange number (149F).
I really wish people would report what WHO actually said, and then put the equivalent units in brackets:
"... at temperatures hotter than 65C (149F) ..."
I also wish people would report in SI units always. Put local units also, but always have SI, either as the primary number, or a secondary in brackets. The preference would be SI as primary and local in brackets as secondary. (remembering, of course, that 6.6bn people use SI units, and 350-400m use those other ones)
But that just my wish... I know it'll likely not happen. But one can always wish and hope...
But the difference is that metric units make sense right away, while American units first need to be converted. Why not write it in metric units directly?
And if the cameras become 'publicly identifiable'
You mean "'When the cameras become publicly identifiable"'?
Considering that only a handful of countries in the world use Fahrenheit, it would have been nice for the editors to have both Celsius and Fahrenheit in the summary text.
You don't NEED to "pick up the values" when it comes to Celsius. Especially when it comes to something like coffee, where 100 is boiling and 0 is frozen. Especially if you know that water cannot usually be heated past boiling point. You know, 100.
As opposed to Fahrenheit where I still haven't remembered what the upper and lower values are supposed to be in what situations other than vague statements of "well it's what's comfortable" or whatever.
When there is a perfectly good SI measurement for Temperature?
>> 149 degrees Fahrenheit
I don't drink at Fahrenheit temperatures, so I should be safe.
aaaaaaa
Maybe a couple of years ago my step-mother found some crackpot pseudo-medical claim online that drinking cold beverages is also bad for you and causes cancer. She showed it to me to "help" me and if I remember, it claimed that any beverage not at a temperature close to the human body temperature was potentially very bad for you. It involved a bunch of ramblings about how your body has to use energy to warm up the cold beverage and using that energy is supposedly bad. So she stopped ordering any drinks in restaurants with ice and my poor late father started doing the same. I never asked him about it before he died, but I assume he decided that it wasn't a battle he wanted to fight and he'd just go along with her on it.
But this is an American site! I want all my measurements to be in libraries of congress, football fields, and statues of liberty. For those who don't understand the metric system, 65C is approximately 1/20th the temperature of the inside of a blue 4th of July firework!
No scientists with respect for them self uses fahrenheit.
Significant figure fail, you ignorant fuckwit.
You don't NEED to "pick up the values" when it comes to Celsius. Especially when it comes to something like coffee, where 100 is boiling and 0 is frozen.
For the temperatures he was referring to, he (hopefully!) does: 1) "how hot/cold is it in here/out there?" and 2) "do I have a fever?"
As a scientist, who uses exclusively metric every day at work, I still don't have much familiarity with "how hot/cold is it in here/out there?" temperatures in Celsius.
As opposed to Fahrenheit where I still haven't remembered what the upper and lower values are supposed to be in what situations other than vague statements of "well it's what's comfortable" or whatever.
Which is entirely a matter of familiarity. The temperatures at which water freezes and boils are not the most useful reference points for most of our daily interactions with the world. For any temperature scale in use, those interactions require familiarity from daily use.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
You would think that WHO would have something better to do. I mean, considering the billions of people who regularly drink hot coffee and tea, and the very low rate of esophageal cancer, the risk hardly seems worthy of discussion.
Proverbs 21:19
The temperature-limiting factors for me are the roof of my mouth -- first tissue to burn, and soon slough off -- followed by my lips.I can't even imagine burning my esophagus. Or, maybe I AM burning my esophagus, and don't even know it? At what temperature have my mouth and lips been burning?
Disease cause by mistakes in cell replication occur more often in individuals who do things to cause cells to replicate.
It's like I've always wondered about smoking, how much of it is the tar and chemicals actually putting something in your body, as opposed to them just choking the lining of your lungs and causing massive cell death and replication...thus increasing the chance of a cancerous mutation. Or the fact that more gay men have colon cancer...is the increased friction causing cells to die and regrow at an increased rate?
OMFG shut up already all you Celsius-insisting assholes
More like
"repeatedly burning your software tissue and causes regeneration that may lead to defects and cancer"
Also applies to hot anything, including water!
Farenheit was used originally. It was developed in 1724. Celsius wasn't developed until 1742 and it was backwards (0 C = boiling, 100 C = freezing).
You don't NEED to "pick up the values" when it comes to Celsius.
So it's intuitively obvious, to somebody unfamiliar with Celsius, Fahrenheit, or any other temperature scale, other than knowing the values of the freezing and boiling points of water, that 20 to 25 Celsius is a reasonably comfortable temperature, that 30 Celsius is getting a bit warm (as in "you probably don't want to wear anything long-sleeved"), and 35 Celsius is in the "hot enough for you?" range? (Note: my choice of multiples of 5 is somewhat arbitrary.)
Especially when it comes to something like coffee, where 100 is boiling and 0 is frozen. Especially if you know that water cannot usually be heated past boiling point. You know, 100.
And that tells me what 65C is like, other than "in the range of 2/3 of the way from the freezing point to the boiling point"? I know drinking boiling water would not be good, but I don't know what 65C/149F water is like. (This whole discussion does mean I'd like to do some measurements so that I know what, for example, the temperature of my tea is once poured, and what it is when I find it comfortably drinkable. But the numerical values would be completely arbitrary, so either scale would work equally well for me.)
WHO guidelines for "probable carcinogen" are somewhat different than what most organizations in the US use. The WHO puts something on the probable carcinogen list if there is evidence that the compound is at all capable of causing cancer in any dosage, regardless of whether in reality it does or does not in normal use. This makes their list somewhat longer, but less meaningful. not sure how relevant that factoid may be here, but maybe.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Repeatedly damaging skin cells with liquid magma , may in fact over time contribute to Cancer Mutations..... OMG...
Celsius's original scale
FTFY
Hot tea or coffee has much more immediate effects than cancer. Effects which, in any of the 7 billion of us alive, cause us to not drink our tea or coffee so hot.
File this under: Stupid stories causing alarm in the stupid. More stupid News at 11.
I don't mind the submitter translating it into imperial measurements, but it would be nice to keep the original (SI) measurement in the text as well.