Does coffee prevent diabetes?

Friday, April 25, 2014 by: J. Anderson
Tags: coffee, diabetes, antioxidants

(NaturalNews) Americans are coffee drinkers, with over 50% of us relying on the stuff to wake us up in the morning and keep us alert throughout the day. Besides being able to help fight fatigue, recent research has found that increasing your consumption of coffee can help prevent the risk of type 2 diabetes.

The Study

The research, which was published in Diabetologia, was the first to find that actually increasing (not just consumption in general) your coffee consumption by 1.5 cups/day (or around 360ml) over a four-year period can decrease your risk of type 2 diabetes by 11%! The authors studied three long-term databases that tracked individual's lifestyle, diet and physical/medical conditions. From this data (over 7,200 cases of type 2 diabetes within the data), they found that participants who increased their consumption of coffee by 1.69 cups/day lowered their risk of type 2 diabetes, while participants who decreased their consumption by at least one cup/day actually had a greater risk of type 2 diabetes, by as much as 17%!

The authors hypothesized that this increased risk of type 2 diabetes associated with decreased coffee consumption could be due to true risk or could be due to people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes decreasing their consumption after diagnosis. The authors did note, "In these 3 large prospective cohorts with more than 1.6 million person-years of follow-up, we observed that increasing coffee, but not tea, intake over a 4-year period was associated with a lower type 2 diabetes risk in the next 4 years. Decreasing coffee intake was associated with a higher type 2 diabetes risk. These changes in risk were observed for caffeinated, but not decaffeinated coffee, and were independent of initial coffee consumption and 4-year changes in other dietary and lifestyle factors."

Other Great Benefits of Increased Coffee Consumption

Another great benefit of coffee is that it is loaded with antioxidants, and in fact a 2005 study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that coffee is American's number one source of antioxidants. The study found that one cup of coffee beats a serving of oranges or even blueberries in terms of their antioxidant content! Antioxidants can play a role in preventing inflammation, which can be associated with heart disease or a number of other diseases.

Likewise, it was found by Harvard Medical School research that the regular consumption of coffee can reduce the risk of prostate cancer! The long-term study found that men who drank at least 1-3 cups of coffee a day compared to men who never drank it had a 20% lower risk of prostate cancer! Likewise, those who drank 4-5 cups had a 25% lower risk of prostate cancer compared to those who never drank coffee!

Wrap-Up

Increasing your coffee consumption (to a certain extent; all things in moderation) can help reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes as well as provide you with a healthy dose of powerful antioxidants! So pour yourself another cup!

Sources for this article include:

http://www.eurekalert.org

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://science.naturalnews.com

http://truthwiki.org/Natural_Help_for_Diabet...

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