Once again, coffee appears to be good for you after all.
To coffee or not to coffee? That is the question isn’t it. As someone who hates the taste, and smell, of coffee, I often wonder if I need to drink it because there always seem to be new studies telling us about the health benefits of this drink. For example, it has been linked to lowering your risk of liver cancer, helping to prevent Parkinson’s, helping women with tinnitus, and being good for the heart. But now a new study shows that coffee can also help protect against type 2 diabetes.
Researchers at UCLA showed that drinking coffee increased plasma levels of sex hormone-binding globulin. They went on to say that there is an inverse association between coffee drinking and risk for type 2 diabetes. However, I do have to point out that adding sugar to your coffee is going to have an impact on how your body responds to sugar.
Another study done at the University of Athens, Greece, states how they believe the antioxidant qualities of the coffee bean are making the difference. They looked at 1,300 adults over a ten year period. They measured oxidative stress, and inflammation markers. 13 percent of men and 12 percent of women had developed diabetes in the course of the 10 years. As the article states, “they found that habitual coffee drinkers were 54 percent less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, even after accounting for other disease risk factors such as family history and smoking.”
These studies get me excited about small changes that my patients can make that will potentially have big impacts on their lives, but what about doing what is best for the body overall? Eating whole foods, exercising, keeping your stress down, and supporting your system with the nutrients, antioxidants, and other support that it needs will affect your risk for getting type 2 diabetes, or any other disease for that matter. Are we as a society just looking for the quick fix, or the tasty solution rather than making long term lifestyle changes?
I am still not going to add coffee into my diet, but only because of what my taste buds have to say about it. There are plenty of other antioxidants that I can ingest in the form of brightly colored fruits and veggies. But for all of you coffee drinkers out there please enjoy it black, and toast to your health.
Source: Medical News Story, and Huffington Post
Image: Toshihiro Oimatsu (CC 2.0 Generic)