Scientific evidence has shown that following a Mediterranean diet has numerous positive health effects, such as delaying Alzheimer’s or rejuvenating the brain. Among the foods that most characterize the eating habits of Spaniards, there is a drink that many of us cannot go through at breakfast time: coffee.
For a long time, this food has been vilified by science itself. However, there are more and more studies that support that an adequate consumption of caffeine can be very beneficial for the body, that it improves cardiovascular health, prevents some types of cancer and reduces the risk of acute kidney injury.
Just a few days ago, its ability to prevent obesity and control blood sugar was added to this long list, and now, a new study gives it anti-inflammatory properties. This is good news for a country like ours, where 65.5 million cups of coffee are consumed every day, according to the Spanish Coffee Association. Of these, 46.5 million are consumed at home, but both at home and in restaurants, we prefer that contain caffeine: of every 100 coffees served in hotels, only 14 are decaffeinated compared to the 86 that do contain this substance.
This compound has been the focus of this research, which now relates daily coffee consumption to reduction of subclinical or systemic inflammation, an effect related to many chronic, cardiovascular and other diseases. In fact, scientists associate drinking coffee with lower insulin resistance and claim that doing so significantly reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetesprecisely because of these anti-inflammatory effects.
The work, published in the scientific journal Clinical Nutritionaffirms that only the fact of add a cup of coffee to daily intake the risk of suffering from it decreased by 4% and up to 6%. In addition, it should be noted that the benefit depends on how you prepare it, since the researchers point out that it was greater in the ground coffee drinkers (filtered or espresso).
“Type 2 diabetes is considered in part an inflammatory disease. Therefore, it is accepted that higher concentrations of proinflammatory markers in blood plasma are a risk factor for type 2 diabetes,” explained Dr. Carolina Ochoa-Rosales, Postdoctoral Scientist in Nutrition and Genetic Epidemiology at Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and lead author of the study. Medical News Today.
That is why the researchers studied possible changes in these levels of biomarkers for prolonged coffee consumption. Thus, they analyzed the levels of C reactive protein (an increase in this is associated with the risk of suffering from diabetes) or the adiponectin (an anti-inflammatory hormone that regulates glucose metabolism). In this way, the study determined that drinking coffee increases the levels of adiponectin and, at the same time, decreases those of C-reactive protein (CPR) and those of leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite.
In people with type 2 diabetes, resistance to insulin produced by the pancreas makes it unable to control blood sugar levels. “Insulin resistance is largely determined by subclinical inflammationwhich apparently improves with coffee consumption”, says Professor Trudy Voortman, from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam and director of the study. Therefore, it was possible to conclude that coffee prevents diabetes.
If you smoke, coffee won’t have as much health benefits
Furthermore, it was discovered that the benefit is much greater in people who do not smoke or have never done it. Initially, the researchers believed that smoking could be a confounding factor in their analysis “since there are heavy coffee consumers who tend to be smokers,” explains Dr. Carolina Ochoa-Rosales, postdoctoral scientist in Nutrition and Genetic Epidemiology at the Center Physician at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and lead author of the study. However, when they compared the effect of coffee consumption on diabetes risk between smokers and non-smokers, they found that the positive association of coffee with a reduction in C reactive protein and the risk of type 2 diabetes was an effect that only occurred between ex-smokers and non-smokers.
The main strong point of this research is that it not only relates a drop in the risk of suffering from diabetes to coffee consumption, something that other studies have already achieved, but also sets out a possible mechanism; an answer to why. Another important fact that makes it relevant is the large number of individuals included in cohorts and the long time they were followed. In this sense, the authors of the study analyzed a large data set of participants that came from the Biobank of the United Kingdom (Biobank) and the Rotterdam Study of the Netherlands.
The UK Biobank Cohort included 502,536 individuals from England, Scotland and Wales who began participating in the study between April 2006 and December 2010. They were between the ages of 37 and 73. On the other hand, the Rotterdam study, which began in 1990, is still ongoing and has the participation of 14,929 people.
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