Fresh Brewed Nutrition Part III

Welcome back to the third installment of Fresh Brewed Nutrition.

In case you are joining us for the first time, please check out Part 1 and Part II.

This time around, we will be looking at how coffee may be able to help prevent one of the most rapidly increasing chronic diseases in the world: Type II Diabetes.

What Does Coffee Have to Do With Diabetes?

More often than not, when researchers set out to see whether coffee drinkers have lower rates of Type II Diabetes,  they find that they do. Although the results of this research is fairly consistent, a nagging problem seems to arise: confounders. You see, the majority of the research on coffee and diabetes are association studies. As described in Part I, association studies are far from perfect and may have outside factors (called confounders) that hinder the accuracy of results. Though confounders are important, researchers use sophisticated statistical programs to reduce confounder’s influence on the results. Taken together, these results suggest that coffee is probably protective against Type II Diabetes.

Researchers are working hard to figure how a delicious caffeinated beverage may fight chronic disease. This is what they have figured out thus far:

Insulin Sensitivity

As you may know, Type II Diabetes begins when your cells become resistant to insulin for a long period of time. Faced with this resistance, your body needs to produce more and more insulin to get blood glucose into your cells. After a while, insulin producing cells in your pancreas (known as beta cells) become “burned out” and can’t make insulin quite like they used to. To prevent this, you want to keep your cells nice and sensitive to insulin so that your pancreas doesn’t have to do double duty.

Interestingly, when scientists give subjects coffee, they find their cells become less sensitive to insulin. This contradicts what we would expect from a compound that supposedly prevents diabetes. But when subjects are followed long-term, their insulin sensitivity actually improves. At the very least, the coffee may prevent insulin sensitivity from getting worse as we age.

Impairing Your Bodies Ability to Make Glucose

When it’s low, your body has the amazing ability to make its own glucose. This is very helpful when we fast for a long period. When we already have plenty of glucose floating around, we want this process to be stopped. If we already have enough glucose and your body starts producing even more, your pancreas has to kick into overdrive to pick up the slack. Although your body is good at stopping this process when it doesn’t need to use it, but your body is far from perfect. Remember Chlorogenic Acid from Part II? It appears that Chlorogenic Acid may lend your body a hand in putting on the brakes on unnecessary glucose production.

Preventing Insulin Spikes

After you eat a meal, your digestive tract breaks the carbohydrates down into their simplest form: glucose. Depending on what you eat, that glucose can get absorbed quickly or slowly into your bloodstream. When it gets absorbed slowly, your pancreas can leak out a little insulin at a time to get that glucose into your cells. On the other hand, when glucose comes barraging into your bloodstream, your pancreas has to pour out a ton of insulin to compensate. This is known as an insulin “spike”. This spike is thought  to make cells less sensitive to insulin. Our good friend Chlorogenic Acid has been shown to help glucose get absorbed more gradually into your bloodstream.

Getting More Magnesium

Unlike trans fats or vitamin D, magnesium isn’t a nutrient that gets a lot of press attention. For good reason: most people get more than enough magnesium without a second thought. However, people with diets that are unhealthy tend not to get enough magnesium. Magnesium is found in healthy foods like whole grains, green leafy vegetables, and nuts. The more magnesium that someone eats, the lower their risk of developing Type II Diabetes. Its still unclear whether the magnesium itself is having any effect on blood glucose or whether it’s simply a reflection of the healthy diets of people who tend to eat a lot of magnesium.

Will Drinking Coffee Prevent Diabetes?

Unfortunately not. Although there is some potential for coffee as a factor in preventing diabetes, the research is far from clear.

What is clear is that there are other lifestyle factors  that will certainly stave off diabetes: exercise, not smoking, eating a healthy diet, and maintaining a healthy weight.

If you are at all concerned about diabetes, your best bet is to stick with the known preventers and drink coffee for the shear enjoyment of it.

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