Jan 16 2009
More Healthy News About Coffee
The other day, I was busy debunking myths about caffeine consumption. Today, the news is even better.
According to Dutch and American researchers, coffee actually reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes.
The researchers spent time reviewing nine studies involving 193,473 people (including 8,394 cases with Type 2 diabetes) across Europe and the U.S.
Their findings were that ”those participants who consumed large amounts of coffee, six or seven cups, had a 35 percent lower risk of developing the disease than those who consumed two or fewer cups per day.” (In addition, gender, obesity and region had no impact on the results.)
“This systemic review supports the hypothesis that habitual coffee consumption is associated with a substantially lower risk of type 2 diabetes,” concludes the authors of the study in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
However, they say more studies are needed. “Longer-term intervention studies of coffee consumption and glucose metabolism are warranted to examine the mechanisms underlying the relationship between coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes,” wrote investigators Rob M. van Dam, Ph.D. and Frank B. Hu, MD, Ph.D.
Dr. van Dam is with the Department of Nutrition and Health, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Dr. Hu is with the Department of Epidemiology Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.