Coffee Cuts Risk of Diabetes Development

The words "bad" and "habit" just seem to go together. People can have good habits, sure, but we typically associate habits with bad things. Coffee drinking is one such example. The brown libation stains teeth, is loaded with caffeine, and is a pesticide-riddled crop. What could be worse? But a new study from the University of Sydney shows how coffee drinking is a great habit to have for diabetes prevention.

Diabetes affects an astounding number of people today. According to the American Dietetic Association, 23.7 million people in the United States alone have it, and there's no indication the rate will lower any time soon. In fact, a study published in the journal Diabetes Care estimates that over 44 million people will have diabetes 25 years from now, more than tripling the cost diabetes treatment doles out in medical expenses (from $113 billion to $336 million).

So any news that shows even the potential of slashing diabetes risk is good news. The Australian researchers discovered this link after poring over 18 studies that looked into how much coffee was drunk by people with and without type II diabetes (type II diabetes is the clear leader in diabetes diagnosis, accounting for 95 percent of cases). The pool of participants included some 500,000 individuals with approximately 21,000 different types of type II diabetes.

Not only did researchers find that people who drank coffee had a lower risk for diabetes, but that every additional cup they drank brought a decreased risk. For example, if a participant drank two cups of coffee per day, they were about 14 percent less likely to have diabetes. But if people had five cups of coffee a day, they were 35 percent less likely to have diabetes. And this finding held true if people were drinking coffee with or without caffeine.

The Australian study piggybacks on one reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this year, which found that coffee decreased the risk of developing diabetes with every additional cup consumed.

Now, just because a study links coffee drinking to diabetes prevention doesn't mean that any old coffee brand will do. As aforementioned, many coffee brands are boiling over with pesticides. You don't want to be poisoning your body with pesticides, but perhaps more importantly, you don't want to be giving environmentally-unfriendly coffee growing practices the go-ahead. Because by purchasing non-organic brands of coffee, that's essentially what you're doing. So, so long as your coffee is organic-certified, may your cup overflow with joe! But not too much, or you're bound to get burned!