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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.
For those of us in the real world, 149 degrees Fahrenheit = 65 degrees Celsius.
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."
Snopes is your friend to help you from continuously embarrassing yourself by tossing out flippant remarks to things you seemingly know little or nothing about.
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=107;t=000479;p=1
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
McFact No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
McFact No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.)
McFact No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media.
McFact No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
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!
The temperature of the McDonalds coffee machine specified in the lawsuit (195 F) was within the temperature range recommended by the National Coffee Association and Bunn, the largest manufacturer of coffee brewing machines sold in the U.S. 195 - 205 F.
The legal team for the woman surveyed temperatures of coffee machines at a half dozen restaurants nearby the McDonalds, and deceptively reported that temperatures at other restaurants were "as low as" 165 F. Which is a useless statement since one restaurant could've had a broken machine and the other 5 could've been serving coffee at a higher temperature than McDonalds and the statement still would've been true. This is classic tricky phrasing used by lawyers to mislead the jury. It's where the "20 degrees hotter" statement comes from. The adjective that belongs in front is "at most 20 degrees hotter," but because of the tricky way the lawyers phrased it people mistakenly think it's "at least". If their research had actually shown McDonalds was serving coffee too hot, they would've reported the temperature of all 6 other restaurants they surveyed, not just one.
Those 700 incidents were over a period of something like 13 years when McDonalds sold billions of cups of coffee. I number crunched the statistics once. If you lived 5 miles from McDonalds and drove there to buy a cup of coffee and took it home, you were more likely to die in a traffic accident than to scald yourself by spilling their coffee. If their coffee was too dangerous for the public, then so is every car on the road.
I want to say the figure was 18 billion cups of coffee served in that time, but honestly I don't recall exactly. If the 18 billion figure is correct, then those 700 incidents are equivalent to buying a cup of coffee at McDonalds every day, and spilling it on yourself once every 70,000 years. If anything, McDonalds should be getting an award for making a portable and minimal hot beverage container so safe.
Unfortunate, but ultimately irrelevant. The question isn't is hot coffee dangerous. Of course it is. So is hot tea,
Fuck you.
Coffee is to be served hot. There's no problem with serving it hotter than other restaurants do. I'd see that as a good thing. Unless you can point to standards and regulations that require coffee to be served below a certain temperature, your "McFact No. 1" is a failure.
Hot coffee can cause burns. McDonalds settling cases is no different than a super market settling cases when idiots slip and fall despite the wet floor signs. it does not indicate a problem with the coffee, it indicates problems with the customers (they're idiots) and the legal system (it's easier to pay idiots to go away than it is to fight them in court and hope the idiots on the jury side with you against a fellow idiot). "McFact No. 2 is a failure.
I don't care how serious the woman's injuries were. They were caused by HER spilling the coffee she knew to be hot. If you buy a knife and cut yourself like an idiot, can you sue for the knife being too sharp? But what if you like, cut yourself really badly? Does that somehow change who is culpable? (I wouldn't be surprised if you could trot out cases where exactly this happened. That doesn't make the reasoning any less ludicrous, however.). "McFact No. 3" is a failure.
Yes, the little old lady said she was a nice little old lady and only wanted her medical bills paid. Is she also selling a used car that she only ever drove on Sundays, to and from church? "McFact No. 4" is a failure because it has nothing to do with anything.
A rando (no typo here) McDonald's employee claimed McDonald's was aware of the risk? Of course they're aware. They're also aware of the risk of operating a drive through window. People could incorrectly drive their cars and hit things! Further, the rando employee cannot speak to whether or not "most customers wouldn't think it was possible". If such testimony as admitted, McDonald's lawyers failed. "McFact No. 5" is a failure. A rando employee's comments about McDonald's awareness that coffee is hot doesn't mean McDonald's is at fault for someone spilling coffee on themselves. Coffee being hot, and hot things causing burns, is common sense. You'd be hard pressed to find an animal that doesn't know this, let alone a human.
Careful deliberation? You know nothing of what went on in that room. The verdict was absurd, as was the reward. Comparing it to McDonald's revenue has no bearing on anything. "McFact No. 6" is a failure.
Lowering the award? Who cares? It's still the wrong fucking decision. "McFact No. 7" is a failure. It doesn't change how wrong the decision was.
Hot coffee still burns? WHAT A SHOCK! "McFact No. 8" is the biggest failure of all. What are you trying to prove with that? It's meaningless!
The hot coffee fiasco is a groundbreaking case because the decision was 100% wrong and it exemplifies just how fucked up the legal system is, and how fucking stupid juries are. I don't give a shit about McDonald's, and they can easily pay ridiculous awards in these cases (and let's be clear, they're fucking awards - prizes for being an idiot). But if you fail to see that this isn't about a little old lady fighting an evil mega corp you're just as dumb as she was. Lawsuits are fucking out of control in this country, and shit like this is why companies have resorted to binding arbitration clauses for everything from cell phones to medical care. It's harder and harder to recoup damages from real injury caused by malicious or negligent corporations, but it's easier than ever to sue for hollow, illegitimate shit.
Coffee is to be served hot.
No, not nearly that hot. Most drip coffee machines *brew* it at the McDonald's temperature, but it is kept at a much lower temperature (around 160F) in the carafe. One reason for this is that it rapidly loses quality if you keep it too hot.
People know what temperature coffee is almost universally served at, and they take the appropriate care. If you fill a cup of coffee from a coffee machine to the brim and carry it around, you just don't need to be that careful because it's just not that hot (unless it's from McDonald's). If you fill the same cup to the brim with water at a full rolling boil out of a pot, you're damned well going to be instinctively much more careful with it, because a small splash could give you serious burns.
You may now post one of your typical obscenity-laced abusive replies. It won't make you any less wrong.
Why the fuck was she trying to drink while driving? Why the fuck was she holding the coffee between her legs while driving?
She wasn't driving. She was in the passenger seat and the car was parked.
The "195 - 205 F" recommended temperature range you quote is the brewing temperature, not the serving temperature. Unless McDonalds serves each cup as soon as it's brewed, and I doubt that they are, they are purposely holding the temperature high before serving it. In fact, keeping brewed coffee hot diminishes its flavor, so what they are doing makes no sense except to keep some customers from complaining that by the time they brought their cup of coffee to the office it wasn't hot anymore.
Arguably the most stomach-churning food I've ever seen came from the Americans:- Pork brains in milk gravy (More here).
:-6
It's the pink-coloured "milk gravy" that makes this truly nauseating.
I mean, really? And you have the nerve to get squeamish about haggis, FFS?!
Never mind the fact that hot dogs are probably as bad (in terms of what they contain) as haggis, if not far worse. Of course, *they* have the advantage of being ludicrously processed to the extent that there's no sign of their origins for ignorance-is-bliss Americans who like to argue about whether ketchup or mustard is the preferred topping for their sausageful of ground-to-atomic-size pigs' lips and assholes...
Pork brains in milk gravy, though? So far ahead of either in the retch-inducing stakes it's not even funny.
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