Warning to anyone who has hot drinks over unexpected cancer link

Worryingly, drinking piping-hot skinny lattes on the regular may be detrimental to your health, according to a new cancer study from Oxford University.

On Tuesday (8 September), a paper was published in the International Journal of Cancer titled ‘Hot Drinks and Oesophageal Cancer: Prospective Analyses in Around 1 Million UK Adults’.

The shocking study saw Oxford University researchers analysing 14 years of data of 977,282 middle-aged men and women.

Participants were asked how they preferred to consume hot drinks.

Available answers included ‘very hot’, ‘hot’, ‘warm’, and ‘do not drink hot drinks’.

Conclusions were drawn based on people’s estimation of how hot consumed drinks were, rather than exact temperatures, as reported by The Guardian.

The European results suggested that those who regularly drank beverages considered ‘very hot’ (more than 65 degrees) would be three times more likely to be at risk of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) than those who drank their tea or coffee ‘warm’.

Your habitual 'hot drink' habit could be raising your risk of cancer, according to a new study (Getty Stock Image)

Consuming six or more hot drinks per day also raised the risk by 71 percent, according to the data.

“The fact that we observed a clear trend in risk across self-reported temperature categories suggests that further limiting the temperature at which individuals consume their drinks to something well below average for this population may well avoid an even greater proportion of SCC cases,” the researchers confirmed.

“This large UK study of middle-aged adults, amongst whom hot drinks are widely consumed, provides clear evidence that temperature and frequency of hot drink consumption represent useful targets for SCC prevention.”

However, the study stated that hot drinks do not heighten the risk of getting adenocarcinoma (AC), the other form of oesophageal cancer, as per The Guardian.

Lead researcher Dr Keren Papier said her team’s findings linked with research collected in South America, which showed a similar link between hot drinks and oesophageal cancer.

But she said: "More research is now needed to identify the exact drink temperatures linked to this increased risk.”

The study lead has said 'more research' is needed to 'identify the exact drink temperatures linked to the increased risk' (Getty Stock Image)

Fiona Osgun, the head of health information at Cancer Research UK, which funded the study, stated: “It’s difficult to put an exact time on how long a hot drink should be left to cool. But if you’re worried, we’d suggest just waiting until it’s comfortable to drink rather than drinking it while it’s still very hot.”

The charity confirmed that it doesn’t believe cafes, coffee shops, and restaurants should start serving lower-temperature drinks to reduce the risk of SCC.

Muy-Teck Teh, a professor of molecular oral oncology at Queen Mary University of London, has also weighed in on the report.

He said that the research’s reliance on ‘self-reported temperatures’ may have affected the conclusions.

“A key limitation, however, is that perceived drink temperature is inherently subjective, and it remains unclear whether individuals who tolerate or prefer very hot drinks have altered thermosensation or mucosal sensitivity that might itself reflect underlying biological predisposition to squamous cell carcinoma and lead them to prefer hotter drinks.

“This possibility cannot be excluded and complicates interpretation of causality”, he added.