Study: Coffee linked to lowered diabetes risk

If you relish drinking coffee, you may be brewing up a healthy dose of prevention from type 2 diabetes.

Dutch and American researchers reviewing a variety of studies found that participants who habitually drank coffee had a lower risk for developing type 2 diabetes. The team based their results on nine studies involving more than 190,000 people and 8,394 cases of type 2 diabetes in Europe and the United States.

The researchers determined that people who consumed more than six or seven cups of coffee a day had a 35% lower risk of the disease than those who downed less than two cups a day. Moreover, people who drank between four and six cups had a 28% lower risk as compared to those who drank less than two cups daily.

"This systemic review supports the hypothesis that habitual coffee consumption is associated with a substantially lower risk of type 2 diabetes," concluded the authors of the study in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

However, the researchers cautioned against drinking coffee as a way to thwart diabetes and urged more research to be conducted on the subject.

Moreover, the researchers didn't check for evidence of some of the unwanted effects of caffeine consumption, such as cardiac effects and the impact on bone loss and increased risk of osteoporosis.

"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," concluded the investigators, led by Dr. Rob van Dam and Dr. Frank Hu.

The authors noted oxidative stress is known to contribute to the development of diabetes and coffee may help averting the condition because its ingredients have been shown to function as anti-oxidants. In addition, the researchers noted coffee consists of chlorogenic acid, which may be linked to benefiting glucose processing.