A study of nearly one million British adults has found that drinking tea or coffee “very hot” rather than warm roughly triples the risk of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, a cancer with a five-year survival rate under 20%. Dr. Keren Papier, a senior nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health who led the analysis, tracked participants from the UK Biobank and the Million Women Study for more than a decade. The temperature of the drink, not whether it was tea or coffee, was what moved the risk.
Why heat, not the beverage itself, drives the risk
The research team asked participants to self-classify their usual tea and coffee temperature as warm, hot or very hot, rather than measuring cups with a thermometer. People who reported drinking “very hot” beverages had close to three times the risk of squamous cell carcinoma compared with those who stuck to warm drinks, and “hot” drinkers carried roughly double the risk of the warm-drinking baseline.
Crucially, the same analysis found no meaningful link between esophageal cancer risk and whether someone drank tea versus coffee, or how many cups they consumed overall. Papier told Cancer Research UK that the finding “adds to existing evidence that drinking very hot drinks could increase the risk of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma,” language that isolates temperature as the variable that matters rather than the beverage in the cup. Squamous cell carcinoma is one of two main esophageal cancer types; the other, adenocarcinoma, showed no clear association with drink temperature in the same dataset, which is part of why researchers describe the effect as specific to one tumor type rather than a blanket esophageal cancer risk.
The 71% jump tied to six or more hot drinks a day
Dose mattered too.
People who reported drinking six or more hot beverages daily had a 71% higher risk of squamous cell carcinoma than lighter drinkers, according to the study, as Medical Daily’s account of the findings lays out. Epidemiologists treat a risk that climbs step by step with both temperature and daily volume as a stronger signal than a single flat association, since a genuine dose-response curve is harder to explain away as coincidence or confounding. A comparable pattern turned up in an earlier UK Biobank analysis, led by researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute and published in the British Journal of Cancer, which found hazard ratios as high as 2.52 for very hot beverage drinkers consuming up to four cups daily.
The World Health Organization’s cancer research arm had already flagged the underlying mechanism a decade earlier. Its International Agency for Research on Cancer defines “very hot” as any beverage above 65 degrees Celsius and classifies drinking at that temperature as probably carcinogenic to humans; the new cohort data now measures that same mechanism across a population roughly a hundred times larger than most single hospital-based studies could ever recruit.
Oxford Population Health’s near-million-person cohort
The scale of the new analysis is what separates it from smaller prior studies. Drawing on almost 980,000 participants combined from the UK Biobank and the Million Women Study, the paper, “Hot Drinks and Oesophageal Cancer: Prospective Analyses in Around 1 Million UK Adults,” published in the International Journal of Cancer, gave Papier’s team enough statistical power to isolate temperature from dozens of other dietary and lifestyle variables.
“This is now the largest study to look at that question in a UK population, where many people drink tea and coffee daily,” Papier said, framing the size of the cohort as the reason the temperature signal could be separated from noise that smaller studies could not resolve.
Typical UK serving temperatures for tea and coffee run from about 71 to 85 degrees Celsius fresh off the kettle, well above the IARC’s 65-degree threshold, even though most people let a drink cool closer to 50 to 70 degrees before actually swallowing it.
Why the absolute risk still stays low
Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma remains rare enough in the UK that even a threefold relative increase translates into a modest absolute risk for any one drinker. Cancer Research UK put the baseline lifetime risk of the cancer at roughly 1% for the UK population overall, meaning tripling that figure still leaves the large majority of heavy hot-drink consumers unaffected personally, even as the relative risk climbs sharply on paper.
The low absolute number does not erase the public-health relevance of the finding, because tea and coffee are consumed daily by a large share of adults in Britain and beyond. Even a small per-person risk increase can translate into a meaningful number of additional cases once it is spread across a population that size, which is why Papier’s team framed the result as worth publicizing despite the low individual odds.
Papier’s team has not proposed an official temperature guideline, and no UK health body has issued new drinking advice on the back of the study. The clearest takeaway researchers point to is behavioral: letting a drink cool below “very hot” before the first sip.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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