Drinking four or five cups of tea or coffee a day can help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes

A recent investigation by researchers in Archives of Internal Medicine has found that those who drink on average 4 or 5 cups of coffee or tea a day can lower their risk of diabetes by a fifth or more. The investigation involved nearly 500,000 people, and could be key to the future prevention of diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes normally develops around the age of 40, when the body cannot make enough insulin, or the insulin that it produces doesn’t work properly. This type of diabetes is treated with diet and exercise, and medication is often required too.

However, the study also found that the participants who drank on average 4 to 5 cups of decaffeinated coffee lowered their risk of getting the disease by a third, rather than a fifth.  This has lead researchers to believe that the link to risk reduction of diabetes is unlikely to be from the caffeine present in tea and coffee.

Lead researcher Dr Rachel Huxley, from the University of Sydney in Australia, said instead that other compounds in coffee and tea - including magnesium and antioxidants known as lignans or chlorogenic acids - may be involved.

Yet, although we don’t know why these drinks reduce the risk of diabetes, no-one can deny that this new information is intriguing and possibly even groundbreaking in diabetes research. The authors of the study would certainly agree. Dr Huxley says, “The identification of the active components of these beverages would open up new therapeutic pathways for the primary prevention of diabetes mellitus. If such beneficial effects were observed in interventional trials to be real, the implications for the millions of individuals who have diabetes mellitus, or who are at future risk of developing it, would be substantial”.