THURSDAY, Nov. 7, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- New research will provide a pick-me-up of health news for coffee lovers: People who drink lots of it may be at a lower risk of developing blood sugar problems.
Drinking a liter or more of coffee a day, or about four 8-ounce cups, cut the risk of Type II diabetes in half compared with those who consume two or fewer cups daily, Dutch researchers found.
The news is somewhat surprising, experts say, since recent evidence shows a modest amount of caffeine can impair the ability of cells to use blood sugar. However, the scientists say other substances in coffee may overcome this effect. These substances include chemicals called chlorogenic acids, which retard glucose absorption in the gut and reduces the liver's sugar output.
"We now need to do an intervention study" to compare the effects of coffee on diabetes risk as if it were a drug, says Rob van Dam, a nutrition expert at Amsterdam's Vrije University and a collaborator on the latest work. "I think you need that kind of data before you really give advice to the general public on this issue."
The scientists report their findings in a research letter appearing in this week's issue of The Lancet.
Van Dam and a former co-worker, Edith Feskens, of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, compared daily coffee consumption and the risk of Type II diabetes in 17,111 Dutch men and women between the ages of 30 and 60.
More than 4,200 reported drinking at least seven 125-milliliter cups (about four ounces each) of coffee a day. These people were fatter, less active, smoked more and ate worse than those who drank less coffee. Yet their risk of developing Type II diabetes was half as high as that of men and women who said they drank two or fewer cups of coffee a day.
The Dutch tend to drink stronger coffee than North Americans. The researchers didn't look at caffeine intake. However, they found no link between tea and diabetes risk -- suggesting that whatever benefit coffee may confer is unrelated to its caffeine content.
Dr. Peter R. Martin, a psychologist who studies coffee at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., says the latest work blends nicely with experiments he and his colleagues have done showing that chlorogenic acids could help regulate sensitivity to insulin.
"The question is, if caffeine causes insulin resistance, why is coffee negatively associated with diabetes? Coffee is complex and maybe it has within it naturally opposing chemicals that make it non-dangerous or neutral," Martin says.
Martin, who directs Vanderbilt's Institute for Coffee Studies -- which receives java industry funding -- says it doesn't necessarily follow that if regular coffee is a wash, decaf is better. "It's probably an interaction of a number of compounds" that together may protect against diabetes, he says. "If you decaffeinate, you lose some of these."
Americans drink an average of 1.6 cups of coffee a day, down from 1.87 cups a day in 1993, says Jay Molishever, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association of U.S.A. in New York City. Molishever blames "misapprehensions" about the health risks of coffee for the slight decline in consumption over the past decade.
"We are now beginning to see more and more studies, such as this one, which show that rather than something to be concerned about, coffee has many health benefits," Molishever says. These include possible protection from colon cancer and Parkinson's disease and improvements in cognitive function.
What To Do
For more on diabetes, try the American Diabetes Association or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For more on coffee, try the National Coffee Association.
