That morning cup of coffee or afternoon spot of tea might be protecting you from cancer.
A new evidence review says that coffee and tea consumption are linked to a lower risk of cancers of the mouth, throat, and head and neck, per the results published in the journal Cancer.
“Even decaffeinated coffee had some positive impact,” senior researcher Yuan-Chin Amy Lee, an epidemiologist with the University of Utah School of Medicine, said in a news release from the journal’s publisher.
Head and neck cancer is the seventh most common cancer worldwide, with approximately 745,000 new cases and 364,000 deaths in 2020 alone, researchers said in background notes.
For the study, researchers pooled data from 14 prior studies involving more than 9,500 people with head and neck cancer and nearly 16,000 healthy folks.
They found that people who drank more than four cups of coffee a day, compared with folks who don’t drink coffee, had broad benefits:
- 17% lower odds of head and neck cancer
- 30% lower odds of mouth cancer
- 22% lower odds of throat cancer
Drinking three to four cups of coffee a day was tied to a 41% lower risk of hypopharyngeal cancer, a type of cancer that occurs at the bottom of the throat, researchers found. Tea drinking lowered the odds of this cancer by 29%.
And caffeine didn’t appear to be the only driver in these lowered risk — drinking decaf coffee was associated with a 25% lower risk of mouth cancer, results show.
Previous studies have found that coffee drinking suppresses biological activity that can support cancer, researchers added.
Drinking one cup of tea or less a day lowered risk of head and neck cancer by 9% overall, researchers found.
However, more than 1 cup of tea daily was associated with 38% higher odds of throat cancer, the paper states.
This increased risk might be caused by tea promoting acid reflux in those who imbibe. Reflux has been associated with a higher risk of throat cancer.
“Coffee and tea habits are fairly complex, and these findings support the need for more data and further studies around the impact that coffee and tea can have on reducing cancer risk,” Lee said.