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 “Extensive research has revealed that coffee drinking exhibits both
beneficial and aggravating health effects,” said Demosthenes B.
Panagiotakos of the department of Nutrition and Dietetics at
Harokopio University in Athens, Greece.
“An inverse relation between coffee intake and diabetes has been
reported in many prospective studies whereas some have yielded
insignificant results,” Panagiotakos, a co-author of the new study,
told Reuters Health by email.
Since he and his colleagues merely observed the study participants,
and didn't assign them randomly to drink or abstain from coffee,
they still can't be sure that drinking coffee helps prevent
diabetes, but their findings might help form the basis of a
cause-and-effect hypothesis, Panagiotakos said.
In 2001 and 2002, the researchers selected a random sample of more
than 1,300 men and women age 18 years and older in Athens. The
participants filled out dietary questionnaires including questions
about coffee drinking frequency.
Drinking less than 1.5 cups of coffee per day was termed “casual”
coffee drinking, and more than 1.5 cups per day was “habitual”
drinking. There were 816 casual drinkers, 385 habitual drinkers and
239 non-coffee drinkers.
The participants also had blood tests to evaluate levels of protein
markers of inflammation. The tests also measured antioxidant levels,
which indicate the body’s ability to neutralize cell-damaging “free
radicals.”
Ten years later, 191 people had developed diabetes, including 13
percent of the men and 12 percent of the women in the original
group. And participants who reported higher coffee consumption had
lower likelihoods of developing diabetes.
Habitual coffee drinkers were 54 percent less likely to develop
diabetes compared to non-coffee drinkers, even after accounting for
smoking, high blood pressure, family history of diabetes and intake
of other caffeinated beverages, the researchers reported in the
European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Levels of serum amyloid, one of the inflammatory markers in the
blood, seemed to explain some of the relationship between coffee and
diabetes, the authors write. Higher coffee consumption went along
with lower amyloid levels.
“Previous studies pointed in the same direction . . . now we have an
additional hint,” said Dr. Marc Y. Donath, chief of Endocrinology,
Diabetes & Metabolism at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland,
who was not part of the new study.
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The new findings are supported by a prospective study in 2013
involving 836 people who didn't have diabetes at the start of the
study, Panagiotakos said. Over the next seven years, high levels of
amyloid and another inflammatory marker called C-reactive protein
"were found to precede the onset of diabetes, independently of other
risk factors,” he said.
It’s possible that other influences were also at work, he
acknowledged.
“Oxidative stress has been shown to accelerate the dysfunction of
pancreatic b-cells and antioxidants intake has been shown to
decrease diabetes risk, so the antioxidant components of coffee may
be beneficial, but still more research is needed toward this
direction,” Panagiotakos said.
Some studies have found that the association between coffee and
diabetes risk is stronger for women and non-smokers, according to
Dongfeng Zhang of the department of Epidemiology and Health
Statistics at Qingdao University Medical College in China, who also
was not part of the new study.
We are not yet sure that coffee helps prevent diabetes, but “what is
sure and remains more effective is exercise and body weight
control,” Donath told Reuters Health by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1I340GN European Journal of Clinical
Nutrition, online July 1, 2015.
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