Coffee

Last reviewed 2026-09-22. How this works.

No action needed Grade C

Human evidence exists and does not settle it.

Coffee was once listed as a possible cause of cancer and was taken off that list in 2016.

Removed from the possible-carcinogen list in 2016.

The claim

The claim, now outdated, is that coffee causes cancer. It was on a possible-carcinogen list for years and the listing is still quoted.

What it does

The old listing is usually quoted as though a danger had been found and then quietly dropped. What the evaluation actually did was separate the drink from its temperature, and only the temperature carried a finding.1

The evidence

A Working Group convened by the International Agency for Research on Cancer reviewed the literature in 2016 and found no conclusive evidence that drinking coffee is carcinogenic. That evaluation is what took coffee off the list it had been on.1

The one carcinogenic finding in that evaluation is not about coffee. Drinking beverages at a very high temperature probably causes cancer of the oesophagus, and that is a finding about the heat rather than about what is in the cup.1

What the evaluation asks is whether coffee causes cancer. It does not ask whether coffee changes what an existing cancer does, and this record holds nothing that does.1

The studies this rests on

  • IARC Working Group on the carcinogenicity of drinking coffee, mate and very hot beverages1

    An agency evaluation of a literature, not a study, summarising observational studies, measured a clinical outcome.

    no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect of drinking coffee; drinking very hot beverages probably causes cancer of the oesophagus, which is a finding about temperature rather than about coffee.

What is absent

No evidence in this record shows that drinking or avoiding coffee changes a cancer outcome.

Scope: coffee and cancer outcomes.

Nobody has run a search to establish this, so it is the register’s reading of what exists rather than a gap somebody has looked for and confirmed.

What to ask

Is there anything I drink or eat regularly that you would want me to change?

The dish-to-person gap

Coffee is eaten as food rather than taken as a measured compound, and the register holds no human pharmacokinetic measurement for it.

When to call your team — no warning signs are recorded

If you have changed how you eat because of something you have read, or are thinking about it, the people treating you can only weigh that if they know about it. That is true when nothing has been written down here, and it is most true then.

The register records no warning signs for this entry. That is not a statement that nothing can go wrong.

Interactions

The register holds no measured interaction between this food and a cancer treatment class. An empty list means nobody has measured it, not that nothing would happen. Concentrated extracts are a different question from the food.

Nobody having looked is not the same as nothing being there. That is what this line says and all it says.

The whole interaction list, and how to turn it into a pharmacy review request.

Find a trial instead

This is an ordinary food rather than an intervention with recruiting trials attached.

References

  1. Loomis D, Guyton KZ, Grosse Y, Lauby-Secretan B, El Ghissassi F, Bouvard V, Benbrahim-Tallaa L, Guha N, Mattock H, Straif K, on behalf of the International Agency for Research on Cancer Monograph Working Group. Carcinogenicity of drinking coffee, mate, and very hot beverages. Lancet Oncology 2016;17(7):877-878.

    doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(16)30239-X · PubMed 27318851

    How this was reached: transcribed from chapter note, via docs/CHAPTER-NOTES.json, chapter 10 note 12.