Drinking coffee could reduce a person’s risk of Type 2 diabetes

New research has reinforced the previously-discovered ability of coffee to reduce a person’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes, showing that regular consumption of the caffeinated beverage has an anti-inflammatory affect that can protect against the disease.
According to The Huffington Post, lead investigator Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos of Harokopio University’s Department of Nutrition and Dietetics in Athens, Greece, and his colleagues found that people had at least 1.5 cups of coffee per day were more than half as likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a 10-year period than those who consumed less than 1.5 cups per day.
“Extensive research has revealed that coffee drinking exhibits both beneficial and aggravating health effects. An inverse relation between coffee intake and diabetes has been reported in many prospective studies whereas some have yielded insignificant results,” Panagiotakos, whose study appears in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, told Reuters Health via email.
Reduced serum amyloid levels may explain the link
In their research, Panagiotakos and his team recruited 1,300 men and women over the age of 18 and placed them in one of three categories: “Casual” coffee drinkers who consumed less than 1.5 cups per day, “habitual” coffee drinkers who drank more than that, and non-coffee drinkers.
They also measured their daily coffee consumption and monitored their blood levels to measure antioxidant levels and inflammation in each of the subjects. A decade later, the authors followed up with the participants and found that while 13 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women had developed diabetes, habitual coffee drinkers were 54 percent less likely do so.
Panagiotakos told Reuters that the findings accounted for other factors, including smoking, high blood pressure, family history of the disease and intake of other caffeinated beverages. The study authors believe that levels of serum amyloid, one of the body’s inflammatory markers, may help explain some of the apparently link between coffee consumption and diabetes risk.
While the authors wrote that the “anti-inflammatory effect of several coffee components may be responsible” for the observed protection from the disease, Panagiotakos noted that while coffee’s antioxidant components “may be beneficial,” that “more research is needed” to know for sure. It is possible that other factors are also involved, he told Reuters.
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