Like your tea piping hot? Beware: served too hot, tea or other beverages may raise your risk of thoat and esophageal cancer.

The evidence comes from research conducted in Golestan Province in northern Iran, which has some of the highest rates of esophageal cancer in the world. The province offers a unique laboratory to study risk because tea drinking is very popular but rates of both smoking and alcohol consumption–two other contributors to esophageal and throat cancer–are very low.

An international team of scientists compared the tea drinking habits of 300 people diagnosed with esophageal cancer to those of 571 healthy controls. These were all serious tea drinker, consuming over one liter of black tea a day. Compared to drinking warm or lukewarm tea, drinking hot tea posed twice the risk of esophageal cancer. Drinking very hot tea posed an eight-fold threat.

The researchers also looked at how soon tea was consumed after being poured. Drinking it within less than two minutes was linked to a five-fold higher risk of cancer compared to drinking it four or more minutes after steeping.

Worrisome, sure. Esophageal cancer is a particularly nasty form of the disease. But it’s also very uncommon in the US. Worldwide, esophageal cancer kills 500,000 people a year.

With plenty of research pointing to the considerable health benefits associated with tea, which is rich in antioxidants and other phytochemicals, it would be a shame to pass up tea. As David C. Whiteman, an investigator with the Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Australia, wrote in an editorial accompanying the new research, “These findings are not cause for alarm, however, and they should not reduce public enthusiasm for the time honoured ritual of drinking tea. Rather, we should follow the advice of Mrs Beeton, who prescribes a five to 10 minute interval between making and pouring tea, by which time the tea will be sufficiently flavoursome and unlikely to cause thermal injury.”

(Mrs Beeton, by the way, pictured above, was a famous cookery writer of the nineteenth century and author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.)

© 2009 PDQhealth

Tags: esophageal cancer, hot tea, temperature