Very Hot Tea and Coffee Linked to Higher Risk of One Esophageal Cancer Type

CATEGORY: DISEASE PREVENTION

You know the sip. The tea has just been poured, it’s clearly too hot, and you drink it anyway. Among nearly a million UK adults, the ones who said they liked their tea or coffee very hot went on to develop squamous cell cancer of the esophagus at more than three times the rate of people who took the same drinks warm.¹ That’s the cancer that grows in the flat cells lining the food pipe, the muscular tube that carries every swallow from your mouth to your stomach.

One Question at Sign-Up, Then Years of Cancer Records

Nobody was told how to take their tea. Researchers in two long-running British projects, the Million Women Study and UK Biobank, simply asked 977,282 adults at enrollment whether they drank their hot drinks warm, hot or very hot, and how many cups a day. Then the national cancer registries did the counting, for an average of 11 to 14 years.¹ Because people were followed as they lived rather than assigned anything, the result is an association, not proof of cause. The pattern ran in steps, though. Six or more cups of hot drinks a day went with a 71% higher risk of the squamous cell type than fewer cups, even after the researchers accounted for smoking, alcohol and other habits that travel with a heavy tea habit.¹

Why Only One of the Two Cancers Moved

The esophagus grows two main cancers, and they told opposite stories. Adenocarcinoma, which starts in gland cells near the stomach junction and is the more common type in the UK, showed no connection to drink temperature at all: 1,303 of those cases arose with essentially identical frequency at every preference.¹ The squamous cells that did show the link are the ones a hot mouthful actually touches on its way down. Repeated scalding is thought to injure that lining over and over, and the World Health Organization’s cancer agency classified drinks above about 65°C (149°F) as probably carcinogenic back in 2016.³ For scale, 65°C is fresh-from-the-kettle territory, the kind of cup you’d still blow on before every sip.

Iranian Tea Country Saw the Same Pattern

This isn’t one dataset’s quirk. In Iran’s Golestan region, where tea is drunk scalding by tradition, researchers measured the actual temperature of 50,045 people’s tea and then followed them for a decade. Drinking large amounts at 60°C (140°F) or hotter went with roughly 90% higher squamous cell risk.² The UK study relied on people’s own sense of what “very hot” means, which is fuzzier, so the two designs lean on each other nicely. Some perspective belongs next to the numbers. This cancer stayed rare either way: 1,045 squamous cell cases turned up in nearly a million people across more than a decade, and smoking and alcohol remain far larger risks for it than any beverage.¹ Still, the team estimated that about 440 UK cases a year, roughly 14% of the total, might not happen if very-hot drinkers took the same drinks merely hot, assuming the link is causal.¹

Key Takeaways

• Temperature mattered for only one of the two esophageal cancers: the squamous cell type tripled among very-hot-drink fans, while the more common adenocarcinoma didn’t budge.¹
• Volume counted too. Six or more hot cups a day went with a 71% higher squamous cell risk than fewer.¹
• An Iranian study that measured tea temperature directly found the same direction, and the WHO’s cancer agency has rated very hot drinks probably carcinogenic since 2016.²
• This is an association from people followed as they lived, not a trial, and the cancer itself stayed rare: about one thousand cases among nearly a million adults over more than ten years.¹

References

1. Papier K, et al. Hot Drinks and Oesophageal Cancer: Prospective Analyses in Around 1 Million UK Adults. International Journal of Cancer. 2026;10.1002/ijc.70654. link
2. Islami F, Poustchi H, Pourshams A, et al. A prospective study of tea drinking temperature and risk of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. International Journal of Cancer. 2020;146(1):18–25. link
3. Loomis D, Guyton KZ, Grosse Y, et al. Carcinogenicity of drinking coffee, mate, and very hot beverages. The Lancet Oncology. 2016;17(7):877–878. link