Coffee and tea: Exactly which drinks ward off type 2 diabetes?
October 20th, 2008
Regularly drinking coffee appears to lower the risk of type 2 diabetes in Asian men and women, a study suggests.
Black tea may have a similar effect, the researchers say, but no such benefits were seen with green tea.
People of European descent have already been shown to lower their risk of diabetes by drinking coffee, but this is the first time the same effect has been reported in people from Asian populations.
Andrew Odegaard, from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, USA, and team looked at data for 36,908 Chinese men and women, aged 45 to 74 years, from Singapore.
People who drank four or more cups of coffee a day were 30 per cent less likely to develop diabetes than those who did not drink coffee daily, the researchers report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Drinking one or more cups of black tea appeared to lower the odds that people would develop diabetes by 14 per cent, but the result was only of borderline significance in statistical analyses.
Green tea was not associated with diabetes risk.
Dr Abraham comments “Dietitians have long made recommendations restricting coffee or tea intake in people with diabetes and now there is firm evidence that, even once you have diabetes, coffee and tea are not harmful. Patients with heart disease at risk of irregular heart rhythms may find that their cardiologist recommends caffeine free alternatives if they are sensitive to the caffeine in these drinks."
