Coffee Tied to Lower Diabetes Risk

Drinking more coffee may decrease your risk of Type 2 diabetes, while cutting down may increase your risk, a new study has found.

Over a 20-year period, researchers periodically collected detailed information on diet, lifestyle and medical conditions in more than 120,000 participants. They found 7,269 cases of Type 2 diabetes.

After controlling for smoking, age, weight, physical activity, alcohol consumption and a family history of diabetes, they found that people who increased their coffee intake by more than an eight-ounce cup a day in a four-year period had an 11 percent lower risk of diabetes than those whose consumption remained steady. People who decreased their consumption by the same amount had a 17 percent higher risk. The report appears online in Diabetologia.

“It’s not the caffeine,” said the lead researchers at Harvard. “We know that. But coffee has a lot of antioxidants and other bioactive compounds” important in glucose metabolism. The effect has been found in previous studies with decaffeinated coffee.

The researchers warned that coffee is not a cure-all, and that a healthy diet and lifestyle are still the best protection against diabetes. If you’re going to eat a doughnut and smoke while having coffee, it won’t help.