Could Coffee Reduce the Risk for Diabetes Development?

Lab tests show rats drinking coffee (black) had lower blood sugar levels than rats drinking water.

Coffee drinking is rarely associated as being a boon for someone’s health.  It’s derided for being too high in caffeine, disparaged as being a cause for tooth staining, and pilloried for being a high calorie diet buster.

While the negative health claims of coffee have elements of truth, the anti-coffee crusaders conveniently ignore the benefits of coffee, such as its ability to reduce a person’s risk of liver cancer and alcohol-related liver disease.

But there’s another reason to grab your cup o’ Joe before leaving for work tomorrow:  It may reduce your risk for diabetes.

With the recent health concerns of former Poison front man Bret Michaels, diabetes has been in the news headlines quite a bit lately.  Michaels suffers from type I diabetes and has become the diabetic community’s front man in helping garner attention to a condition that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide.  Michaels recently appeared on Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for his charity, the American Diabetes Association, in the process.

The hope is that that money will go a long way in helping discover a cure for a disease affects 23.6 million people in the United States alone, as diabetics cope with their disease day after day through insulin therapy, diet alterations and various other treatments.

No one is immune from getting diabetes, and while type I diabetes is usually acquired at birth, type II diabetes—or adult onset diabetes—can occur at any time in life.

But researchers think that people may be able to reduce their risk for type II diabetes by drinking coffee.

Dr. Fumihiko Horio found this link after feeding a group of laboratory rats either water or coffee.  Through blood testing, they found that the rats fed coffee showed an improvement in their sensitivity to insulin and had lower blood sugar levels compared to the water-drinking rats.  Researchers believe coffee’s prevention qualities is due to its high caffeine content, calling caffeine “one of the most effective anti-diabetic compounds in coffee.”

This latest round of research is in contradistinction to a 2008 study that said coffee tended to increase blood sugar levels among diabetics.  In that study, researchers followed 10 people with type II diabetes to see what, if any, effect high levels of caffeine had on their blood sugar levels.  They found that blood sugar levels increased by an average of eight percent when participants consumed a caffeine pill that contained about the same amount of caffeine as an eight ounce serving of coffee.

Of course the difference between the two studies is that one looked at how coffee prevented diabetes, while the other looked at how coffee affected people who already had diabetes.  Another difference is that one study used coffee, while the other used caffeine pills in place of coffee.

This fact alone suggests that it may be something other than caffeine that has diabetes preventive qualities, especially when past studies reached the same conclusions while using decaffeinated coffee.

More research is in the offing.  In the meantime, don’t beat yourself up over your coffee habit.  So long as you’re consuming coffee black and that you’re consuming no more than a couple cups a day, drinking coffee is a healthy habit to have.

Sources
latimesblogs.latimes.com
sciencedaily.com

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