Nutrition Current Topics in Nutrition

Wake Up to the Good News About Coffee

By Christine Haran

It looks like America's coffee craze may be good for people other than the stockholders of Starbucks. More and more studies are suggesting that coffee offers health benefits, including a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, gall bladder disease and even of suicide.

A study published in the March 10th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that was conducted in Finland—where coffee consumption is higher than anywhere else in the world—revealed a link between drinking coffee and type 2 diabetes. The researchers conducted surveys of 6,974 men and 7,655 women, and found that diabetes risk among women drinking three to four cups a day decreased by 29 percent, while risk dropped by 79 percent for women who drank 10 or more cups a day. In men, three to four cups decreased risk by 27 percent and 10 cups lowered risk by 55 percent.

Frank Hu, MD, PhD, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, coauthored another long-term study published in January that also found that coffee consumption reduced type 2 diabetes risk. Below, Dr. Hu discusses the many possible health benefits associated with drinking coffee.

Does coffee lower risk of diabetes?
Studies have found that long-term higher consumption of regular coffee is associated with decreased risk of type 2 diabetes. There are a couple of reasons why that might be true. One is that coffee is not just caffeine. Coffee has large amounts of other ingredients, for example, antioxidants and minerals like magnesium. And those minerals and antioxidants actually are beneficial for blood sugar metabolism and insulin sensitivity. [In type 2 diabetes, people either don't produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar or the body's cells ignore the insulin.] So it's possible that it's the other ingredients in coffee rather than caffeine that protect against diabetes.

Another possibility is that in the long term, caffeine may be beneficial for maintenance of body weight because caffeine can actually increase energy expenditure and basal metabolic rates. However, we don't have much data to support this kind of assumption at this point.

How might caffeine affect blood sugar regulation?
This is a very interesting area, but unfortunately we don't have much data on the effects of caffeine on the metabolism of blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. In the past several decades, people have done short-term studies, where they inject caffeine into the bloodstream. Those studies indicate that caffeine can actually increase blood sugar and decrease insulin sensitivity. So that's actually not good for you in terms of diabetes risk.

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