New Study Shows Coffee Protects Against Diabetes: Coffee is a great way to wake up in the morning. In fact, millions of people surveyed say, that they are not themselves until they have at least had one cup of Joe in the morning. It is the jump-start many people need in the morning, but researchers find that it is having quite a different effect, on personal health.
Through years, coffee has been studied and placed under the scientific microscope quite a few times to see just how healthy it really is and while some findings found that coffee was healthy for the colon and could even reduce blood pressure, skeptics focused on why coffee was not healthy, such reasons were based on its caffeine count. However, a new study tested countless times shows that coffee may protect against type 2 diabetes, but there is no clear evidence as to why.
There are nearly 24 million children and adults within the United States who have been diagnosed with diabetes, that’s 8 percent of American’s nationwide. While there are a couple different types of diabetes out there such as type 1 diabetes and gestational diabetes, type 2 diabetes is the most common one among them all. Typically, 90 to 95 percent of diabetes cases are type 2 diabetic.
Researchers at ULCA have discovered through a study that possible molecular process is behind coffee’s defense against type 2 diabetes. It’s a protein called sex hormone-binding globulin, shortly known as SHBG, it regulates the biological activity of a person’s sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone, which have all been hypothesized of a link in the development of type 2 diabetes. Coffee is known to heighten plasma levels of SHBG.
Through studies, a person who drank coffee found that they had less of a risk of diabetes than those who did not drink coffee. The more coffee in which was consumed, the less risk of person has of diabetes. During the studies, researchers believed that the coffee was improving the body’s acceptance to glucose through escalating its acceptance to insulin.
Through a large mass of clinical studies, an important link was shown between the progress sexual hormones and the progress of diabetes. SHBG not only helps to regulate sexual hormones, which are biologically active, it also ties to receptors in various cells, signaling straight to sexual hormones.
Dr. Simin Liu, a professor at ULCA School of Public Health, has this to say about the research, “It seems that SHBG in the blood does reflect a genetic susceptibility to developing type 2 diabetes. But we now further show that this protein can be influenced by dietary factors such as coffee intake in affecting diabetes risk — the lower the levels of SHBG, the greater the risk beyond any known diabetes risk factors.”
This study was completed on 40,000 women, which was originally designed to evaluate the pros and cons of the use of low-dose aspirin and Vitamin E to prevent cardiovascular disease and cancer. Within the study, researchers found that women who drank four cups of caffeinated coffee each day had higher levels of SHBG, than women who did not drink coffee. Also, women who drank coffee daily had a 56 percent less likely risk of type 2 diabetes.
However, decaffeinated coffee does not seem to have the same effects according to Atsushi Goto, a UCLA doctoral student who reported, “Consumption of decaffeinated coffee was not significantly associated with SHBG levels, nor diabetes risk. So you probably have to go for the octane!”