Studies done in Britain do show that drinking extremely hot tea every day increases your chance of getting throat cancer.

A correlated study done in Iran, which reportedly has the largest number of oesophageal cancer patients, shows the results of research done on a big group of 871 people. It was noticed that around 300 people who drank more than a litre of extremely hot black tea in a day were diagnosed with cancer while the rest were healthy.

What made these 300 people enter the high risk zone?

It was seen that this group had the habit of drinking hot tea above 65 degrees putting them in the high risk zone compared to the others who preferred warm tea below 65 degrees. It was also noticed that those who drank hotter tea, above 70 degrees, bettered their chances of acquiring throat cancer. This shows that by drinking hotter tea and not large amounts of tea resulted in people getting throat cancer.
How do we know what is not hot tea? After boiling your tea, wait for a minimum of 4 minutes to sip on it. It should reach a temperature of 55 to 60 degrees for it to be safe enough to drink.

Habitual tea drinkers revel in the beverages’ likely health benefits. Hot or cold, green and black tea, brimming with disease-fighting antioxidants, trumps coffee for protection against heart disease, cancer, and possibly osteoporosis. But if you prefer your tea extremely hot, you may actually end up increasing your risk for throat cancer.

So says a team of Iranian researchers who traveled to the Golestan Province in northern Iran to find out why that area has one of the world’s highest rates of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), the most common kind of tumors of the esophagus. Inhabitants there don’t use much tobacco or alcohol, the primary cause of such cancers in the U.S. and Europe, but they do drink tea, often at temperatures exceeding 70 degrees Celsius, or 158 degrees Fahrenheit. Water boils at around 212 degrees Fahrenheit.