Balthazar wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:27 pm
mbanu wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 11:41 am
Lips are usually pretty good at temperature assessment.
If I recall, the correlation is found at temperatures above 60 degrees Celsius. For people such as myself, the issue is not so much that we don't know that the drinking temperature is above what might be considered "safe" (or sheer impatience). It's that we find teas (and other beverages) more enjoyable at these higher temperatures. I know I do (same thing with soups).
When I mentioned eating pizza, I didn't mean they started to eat and then their lips told them to stop - I mean they were actually eating it super hot. Your explanation, Balthazar, is what I have kind of had to assume, as well as the possibility that different peoples' oral temperature sensitivities are just different. The many days I have had a burned upper lip in the area where it encounters hot beverages first are a testament to my use of my lips to check temperatures first.
The thing I find interesting about the consumption of hot beverages/linked to cancer thing is that even when I get some tea in my mouth that's a bit too hot (but not hot enough to spit out or reject) is that I will swish it around first and let it cool down before swallowing. For those who are hot beverage/hot food eaters (above 60° C/140° F), are you swallowing it at the hotter temperature, too?
Also - caffeine weakens the flap that keeps stomach acid out of the esophagus and we also know that some teas can be irritating to the stomach in general (but not for everyone). I see where some confounding factors have been controlled for in some studies, but can we say "hot beverages cause esophageal/stomach cancer" or is it possible the most-prevalent hot beverages are coffee and tea, and both have caffeine (to the point that those with reflux, like me, are often advised to stop drinking them or adjust our consumption), so it's not the tea, so much as it is the caffeine/some kinds of tea?
Balthazar wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:27 pm
A large Chinese study gave cause for some optimism among us "non-smokers and non-excessive alcohol consumers" (except for stomach cancer..):
For many years, I smoked. And then I quit, but took up using Swedish snus, which is higher-quality, and seems to have fewer associated health risks, than American smokeless tobacco. A couple of large studies published in The Lancet and the International Journal of Cancer failed to find an increased cancer risk causality for Swedish-style snus. However, you can't just transplant something from one culture into another and draw correlations - there are undoubtedly other things about living in Sweden that are different from other places. Maybe Swedish snus is not a health risk for Swedes, but if you live in America, it is, because there are a million other variables not being held constant in that comparison.
I wonder the same thing about the Chinese study and maybe that's why it found no risk increase (except for stomach cancer) even after excluding the obvious suspects (tobacco and booze), but other studies did?