Can drinking coffee help control type 2 diabetes?

Nutrition scientists aren't ready to recommend coffee as a dietary supplement, but they say something in it is definitely beneficial to controlling the course and perhaps the onset of type 2 diabetes — a mostly diet-based, self-induced metabolism disorder linked to dozens of serious illnesses.

Type 2 diabetes is a largely preventable condition that has reached epidemic proportions in the United States as people have become more sedentary and obesity-prone. Diabetes has been treatable in all forms since the 1920s.

"Coffee has surfaced as a beverage with a lot of up side and very little down side with respect to diabetes," said Michael Lefevre, a professor at Utah State University's Center for Advanced Nutrition who is among researchers worldwide trying to get to the bottom of the coffee/diabetes connection.

Benefits from coffee would appear to defy both logic and the findings of nearly every recent study on caffeine, the bean's natural stimulant that is concentrated in the brewing process. Caffeine makes controlling blood sugar more difficult, and diabetics who continue to drink sugar-free caffeinated drinks are shown time and again to have much more difficulty controlling blood sugar than those who stick to staying decaffeinated.

Some research is showing that whatever the positive effects of coffee, they are negated and possibly outweighed by the health-risk factors of caffeine. Decaffeinated coffee removes that negative factor, but the process to remove the caffeine seems to also remove some of its beneficial effects on blood glucose levels, according to some studies.

"It's a complex set of interactions within the body, and aspects of that are clearly too beneficial not to study further," Lefevre said.

The nature of both type 2 diabetes, which occurs usually around 40 years of age, and type 1, commonly called "juvenile diabetes" is deficiency in the production of or the normal response insulin, the blood glucose-controlling hormone produced in the pancreas. A whole host of health problems can result from uncontrolled blood sugar, from cuts that won't heal, constant hunger or thirst to heart disease and kidney failure.

According to the American Diabetes Association of Utah, in the developed world, diabetes is the most significant cause of adult blindness in the nonelderly and the leading cause of nontraumatic amputation in adults, and diabetic nephropathy is the number one illness requiring renal dialysis.

In Utah where about 63 percent of men and 58 percent of women are overweight or obese and therefore very prone to developing the illness, health insurance companies are allowed to turn people down for individual insurance coverage because the illness is considered an "uninsurable" condition. Employer-based medical insurance plans may not turn diabetics down, but area underwriters say the cost of treating health problems resulting from obesity and diabetes is a key reason behind the annual double digit increases in the cost of health care the price of premiums to pay for it.

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