14 DAY TRIAL // People who take up the habit of drinking a tad more coffee on a daily basis than they normally would are less likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives, researchers argue in a paper published in yesterday's issue of the journal Diabetologia.
Thus, it is said that, according to evidence at hand, an increase in an individual's daily coffee consumption goes hand in hand with a drop in type 2 diabetes risk.
In order to investigate how coffee consumption influences the risk for said medical condition, specialists with the Harvard School of Public Health assessed the overall health condition and the dietary habits of 48,464 women and 27,759 men, EurekAlert informs.
It was thus discovered that, over a period of time of four years, participants who increased their daily dose of coffee by more than one cup had an 11% lower type two diabetes risk than those who stuck to their usual coffee drinking habits.
The Harvard School of Public Health researchers also found that, when compared to folks who chose not to make any changes to their coffee consumption, those who decreased their daily coffee consumption by more than one cup experienced a 17% increase in their type 2 diabetes risk.
“Our findings confirm those of previous studies that showed that higher coffee consumption was associated with lower type 2 diabetes risk,” said Shilpa Bhupathiraju, study lead author and research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health.
“Most importantly, they provide new evidence that changes in coffee consumption habit can affect type 2 diabetes risk in a relatively short period of time,” the researcher went on to argue.
Despite the encouraging findings of this investigation into how patterns of coffee consumption influence a person's health and especially their type 2 diabetes risk, the specialists who worked on this research project wished to stress that folks must nonetheless watch their diet and their weight.
As study senior author Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, put it, “These findings further demonstrate that, for most people, coffee may have health benefits. But coffee is only one of many factors that influence diabetes risk. More importantly, individuals should watch their weight and be physically active.”
During this investigation, a cup of coffee was defined as 8 ounces (about 230 milliliters). The participants whose type 2 diabetes risk dropped by about 11% over a four-year period added an average 1.69 cups of coffee to their daily diet. This coffee was consumed either black or with sugar and/or milk.