Let hot drinks cool down before drinking; avoid tea, soup, and coffee that are piping hot

30. Let hot drinks cool down before drinking; avoid tea, soup, and coffee that are piping hot

Cost: There’s no monetary cost — you just need to wait two to three extra minutes each time. The hard part is resisting the urge to drink them when you’re craving them.

In plain terms: Drinking tea that is extremely hot raises your risk of esophageal cancer by 8 times compared to drinking lukewarm tea. Even “hot” tea doubles that risk. If you drink tea less than two minutes after pouring it, your risk is 5 times higher than if you wait at least four minutes to drink it.

Benefit: In a high-risk area for esophageal cancer in northern Iran, researchers compared 300 patients with esophageal cancer to 571 healthy individuals. All results below are compared to people who drank lukewarm tea. Those who drank “hot” tea had roughly 2.07 times the risk of developing squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus (95% CI: 1.28–3.35). For those who drank “extremely hot” tea, the risk was about 8.16 times higher (95% CI: 3.93–16.9). People who drank tea less than two minutes after pouring it had 5.41 times the risk of those who waited at least four minutes to drink it (95% CI: 2.63–11.1).

Evidence grade: A

Sources: Islami F, Pourshams A, Nasrollahzadeh D, et al. (2009). Tea drinking habits and oesophageal cancer in a high risk area in northern Iran: population based case-control study. BMJ, 338, b929. <https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b929>; Loomis D, Guyton KZ, Grosse Y, et al. (2016). Carcinogenicity of drinking coffee, mate, and very hot beverages. Lancet Oncology, 17(7), 877-878. <https://doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(16)30239-X>

Notes: The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies hot drinks above 65°C as Group 2A carcinogens, meaning they are “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The same assessment also confirms that coffee itself is not carcinogenic. In China, high rates of esophageal cancer in regions such as Chaoshan and the Taihang Mountains are linked to the habit of drinking tea while it is still very hot.