You may have seen a frankly terrifying headline this week:

“Hot drinks probably cause cancer, warns World Health Organisation”

Telegraph, 15th June 2016

Almost every news source carried this story, and the headlines were universally similar to the one above. This story comes from a report by the WHO, which looked at the association between coffee and mate (a South American herbal tea) and various forms of cancer. In short, they found that there was no association between coffee or mate and cancer, but that the temperature of the beverage may be linked to oesophageal cancer. Continue reading →