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Is It Safe To Drink Coffee?
 

The annual consumption of coffee in 2011 was estimated to be 136.5 million bags of 60 kilos each bag, according to the International Coffee Organization (ICO). A simple calculation shows that every person in this planet consumes an average of 1.3 kilos per year. This makes coffee as one of the most favorite beverages in the world.

Coffee seems to be a kind of drink that has sparked debate over its health effects on people. Many previous studies had produced conflicting results.

Health experts have long blamed coffee drinking for causing an increase in heart disease, cancer, stroke and more. For instance, an Italian study found that coffee drinking could slightly raise the risk of development of sustained hypertension (high blood pressure) in people who had elevated blood pressure.

In other cases, however, coffee drinking was found to be beneficial to human’s health. A number of studies have shown that people who drink coffee regularly were significantly less likely to be attacked by Parkinson's disease.

And the good news for coffee lovers is that a paper published on February 15, 2012 in the ‘American Journal of Clinical Nutrition’ argued that coffee drinkers have no more risk of developing diseases like heart disease and cancer, and are less likely to get Type-2 diabetes.

Using data from 42,659 participants of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), a Germany study, researchers from the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke began investigating the association between coffee consumption and the risk of chronic diseases, including Type-2 diabetes, myocardial infarction (MI), stroke and cancer. They gathered information such as coffee drinking habits, diet, exercise and health of these people.

Study participants, who had no prior chronic diseases, were checked every 2 to 3 years to see if they developed any health hazards, particularly heart disease, stroke, heart attack, diabetes and cancer, for the next 9 years. What the researchers found was that coffee drinkers and non-drinkers were similarly likely to get one of those diseases.

Among 8,689 non-drinkers of coffee, 871 got a chronic disease, as compared to 1,124 out of 12,137 people who drank more than 4 cups of caffeinated coffee a day, approximately 10 percent in both groups.

The researchers also found that coffee drinkers were less likely to have Type-2 diabetes than those who did not drink coffee at all. Their analysis showed that 3.2 percent of those who drank 4 cups of coffee a day had Type-2 diabetes, comparing to 3.6 percent of people who were non-coffee drinkers. After discounting factors like weight and smoking that could influence diabetes, researchers found that frequent coffee drinkers were 23 percent less likely to have diabetes.

The findings were more or less in line with those from some previous studies. For instance, Reuters Health reported on December 14, 2009 that higher coffee consumption has been consistency associated with a lower risk of Type-2 diabetes in many studies around the world.

No doubt the new results suggested that coffee consumption would not be harmful for healthy adults in respect of risk of major chronic disease. However, it should not be taken to mean that coffee could prevent Type-2 diabetes.

While experiments in animals have found that certain chemicals found within coffee could positively affect metabolism, the most notorious component of coffee, caffeine, is unlikely to be the likely candidate. This is because frequent decaf drinkers also had a lower risk of developing diabetes than people who did not drink any coffee.

Meanwhile, people who do not enjoy coffee should not be encouraged to start drinking coffee. Likewise, there is also no reason for those coffee drinkers who have no specific health conditions to cut down their coffee consumption to reduce their risk of chronic diseases.

It is the hope of the researchers that future studies could look into the possible biological explanation for coffee’s role in diabetes and how people who already have diabetes respond to coffee.

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