![[Image: Facebook badge]](http://www.supermarketguru.com/public/images/find_us_on_facebook_badge.gif){kind=icon}
![[Image: Twitter Button]](http://www.supermarketguru.com/public/images/twitterButtonLarge.jpg)
Dutch-Holland Review of Nine Int'l Studies: Coffee May Lower Type 2 Diabetes Risk
Published on: September 26, 2008
Dutch and American researchers reviewed nine studies involving 193,473 people, including 8,394 cases with Type 2 diabetes in Europe and the U.S. and concluded that those participants who consumed large amounts of coffee, six or seven cups, had a 35% lower risk of developing the disease than those who consumed two or fewer cups per day.
"This systemic review supports the hypothesis that habitual coffee consumption is associated with a substantially lower risk of type 2 diabetes," concluded the authors of the study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, but they caution the sole use of coffee to deter diabetes until further research is conducted.
"Longer-term intervention studies of coffee consumption and glucose metabolism are warranted to examine the mechanisms underlying the relationship between coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes," wrote investigators Rob M. van Dam, Ph.D. and Frank B. Hu, MD, Ph.D.
The specifics of their calculations of the relative risk (RR) of type 2 diabetes were an RR of 0.65 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.54-0.78) for the highest consumption of coffee per day (6 or 7 cups) and 0.72 (95% CI, 0.62-0.83) for 4-6 cups per day compared to 0 to 2 cups per day. Neither gender nor obesity nor region impacted the figures. Higher coffee consumption was consistently associated with a lower prevalence of newly detected hyperglycemia, particularly postprandial hyperglycemia in all the regions studied: northern Europe, southern Europe, Japan, and the US.
It may be, the researchers opine, that oxidative stress known to contribute to the development of diabetes may be ameliorated by coffee because of its well-known abundance of antioxidants and its chlorogenic acid which aids the processing of glucose in the body.
Dr. van Dam is with the Department of Nutrition and Health, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Dr. Hu is with the Department of Epidemiology Harvard School of Public Health, Boston; Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, were also involved.
