Drink coffee every day to stay away from diabetes

The more coffee middle-aged people drink each day, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Finnish scientists report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Because coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the world, Westerners are not happy without coffee, so the long-term impact of drinking coffee on health has been a concern of scholars around the world. A study published two years ago in the British journal The Lancet showed that the more coffee you consume, the less likely you are to develop type 2 diabetes. But it was widely believed that caffeine in coffee combined with sugar made cells less resistant to insulin, increasing the likelihood of diabetes. So the results have been controversial.

Dr. Jaakko Tuomilehto and colleagues at the National Institute of Public Health, part of the Finnish Ministry of Epidemiology and Health Promotion, have been conducting large-scale studies on coffee and type 2 diabetes since 1982 and have obtained the same results, thus supporting the claim that drinking coffee can help reduce diabetes.

Researchers surveyed more than 14000 Finnish volunteers aged 35 to 64 over a period of 12 years. During the study period, 381 new diabetes patients were diagnosed. The researchers also analyzed factors such as gender, age, smoking, alcohol consumption, education, financial status, daily exercise, body fitness index, and coarse or filtered coffee consumption. The results showed that the more coffee one drank, the lower the risk of diabetes and vice versa.

In addition, the researchers found that people who drank coarse coffee were more than twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who drank filtered coffee. It is worth mentioning that the researchers also analyzed the risk of diabetes in a small number of people who drank tea. The results showed that the more tea they drank, the lower the risk of diabetes. However, due to the small sample size, there is no statistical significance.

Although the study dispels doubts that caffeine and sugar in coffee may cause diabetes, scientists still don't know how caffeine can prevent diabetes. The researchers speculate that chlorogenic acid in coffee may inhibit the conversion of liver sugar into glucose in the body; magnesium ions increase the sensitivity of cells to glucose, thus accelerating the conversion of glucose into liver sugar storage; certain substances in coffee promote insulin secretion and reduce glucose concentrations in the blood.

The researchers point out that these hypotheses still need to be confirmed by a large number of related experiments. The researchers also believe that insulin activity is usually weakened by free radicals, but phenolic compounds or antioxidants contained in coffee and tea can eliminate these free radicals and restore insulin normal activity, but this claim has yet to be confirmed. (abundant words)