Not hot tea, apparently. An international group of scientists has connected it with esophageal cancer. The problem doesn't appear to be the tea, but the temperature at which it is consumed, the study said.
Residents of Golestan Province in Iran have one of the highest rates of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in the world. They don't drink alcohol or smoke -- the disease's two primary risk factors in the West -- but they do consume tea. Lots of it. Nearly 1.2 liters per day, on average. So local researchers set out to see if there was a connection.
They recruited 300 esophageal cancer patients and matched them with 571 healthy controls. All but one of them drank tea, and they told interviewers about their tea habits.
Teaming up with investigators from the United States, England, France and Sweden, the researchers calculated that people who said they drank "hot" tea (149 to 156 degrees Fahrenheit) were more than twice as likely to develop esophageal cancer as people who said they drank the beverage "warm" or "lukewarm" (less than 140 degrees). Those who said they took their tea "very hot" (at least 158 degrees) were more than eight times as likely to get esophageal cancer, said the study published online Thursday in BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.
Doctors advised tea drinkers to simply exercise some patience before enjoying their favorite beverage.
2 comments:
Oh no!!!!! What are we going to do? I always drink hot tea when I need a quick boost of natural leaf mold. What is this world coming to???
Someone will have to invent tea coolers. There is a fortune in that business; I can smell it.
I guess I'll have to go drown my sorrows in a glass of ice water.
(It's just not the same)
LOL, Jonathan! I'm affected by this quite personally, I'm a hot chocolate junky!
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