If you’re fighting diabetes, you’ve got enough to worry about.
You’re already carefully managing your diet and monitoring your blood sugar. And between remaining vigilant for signs of heart disease and eye problems… not to mention everything in between… you’ve get plenty on your plate.
But the reality is experts say a type 2 diabetes diagnosis can shave at least 10 years off your life. A type 1 diabetes diagnosis robs you of even more years. And diabetes is the 7th leading cause of death in the United States.
In other words—like it or not—if you’re diabetic you need to worry about the possibility of an early death too.
But a new study has just revealed one ridiculously simple way to help prevent that premature death.
And it all starts with a mug.
Because according to Portuguese researchers, simply drinking coffee or tea could be the key to surviving with diabetes.
Coffee slashes early death risk up to 80%
The study, presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting, found that women drinking one cup of caffeinated coffee a day were 51 percent less likely to die than ladies who skipped the caffeine during the 11-year study.1
According to the researchers, they uncovered a significant link between consuming caffeine and being less likely to die from ANY cause, in women with diabetes.
And the benefits didn’t end at one cup, either. The more coffee the women drank the lower their risk of death plunged.
Women who drank one to two cups of coffee a day (100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine) had an impressive 57 percent lower risk of dying.
But women who were gulping down over two cups (more than 200 mg) had a stunning 80 percent lower risk of early death.
And that was AFTER they had adjusted for other factors including age, income, education level, alcohol consumption, weight, blood pressure and diabetic kidney disease.
Cancer death risk slashed 80% in tea drinkers
Not a big coffee fan? No problem, try tea instead.
There weren’t nearly as many tea drinkers among the volunteers, but the tea drinkers saw some major benefits too.
The ladies who drank tea were 80 percent less likely to die from cancer than the women who drank none.
Choose green tea and you could be protecting yourself from other diabetes complications, too
EGCG-rich green tea shielded mice from diabetes weight gain and memory loss in an earlier animal study published in The FASEB Journal.2
Coffee and tea drinking could help prevent early death
The new study doesn’t show direct cause and effect. We’ll need a randomized, placebo controlled study to do that.
And the men in the study didn’t seem to get the same death-defying results from drinking coffee. But a ton of earlier research has already found all kinds of benefits from drinking coffee and tea for both sexes.
For example, both men and women benefited from coffee drinking in an earlier study which found a 15 percent lower risk of premature death for java drinkers.3 And according to research published in the journal Annals of Epidemiology, green tea fans could be significantly slashing their risk of dying early too.4
Plus previous studies have found that coffee and tea can improve insulin sensitivity and help diabetics with better blood sugar control.
So if you’re diabetic, and a coffee or tea fan, go ahead and indulge. You could be saving your own life. Just be sure to skip the sugary syrups and sweeteners.
References:
1. “841: Caffeine consumption and mortality in diabetes,” Research presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting, 2017, Lisbon, Portugal
2. “EGCG ameliorates high-fat– and high-fructose–induced cognitive defects by regulating the IRS/AKT and ERK/CREB/BDNF,” The FASEB Journal, 2017
3. “Association of Coffee Consumption with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality in Three Large Prospective Cohorts,” Circulation. 2015
4. “Association of green tea consumption with mortality due to all causes and major causes of death in a Japanese population: the Japan Public Health Center-based Prospective Study (JPHC Study),” Ann Epidemiol. 2015 Jul;25(7):512-518
She is an advocate of self-education and is passionate about the power of group knowledge sharing, like the kind found right here on HealthierTalk.com. Alice loves to share her views on holistic and natural healing as well as her, sometimes contentious, thoughts on the profit-driven inner workings of traditional medicine.
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