Hot drink, anyone?

I like my tea to be really hot and have sometimes been told that I must have an asbestos mouth. So I was interested to read that researchers at the University of California, Davis, produced a study called Drinking Hot Coffee: Why Doesn't It Burn the Mouth? To drink really hot coffee (or hot tea) is to swallow a paradox of pleasure and pain.

The researchers used sensors inside people's mouths to measure the temperatures at four locations inside the mouths of 18 coffee-drinkers while they drank hot coffee. After all the measuring and analysing, they concluded that, probably, during drinking the hot coffee is not held in the mouth long enough to heat the surfaces sufficiently to cause pain or tissue damage. So while drinking too much coffee can be bad for you, you're probably not doing too much harm if you drink it as hot as you can bear.