Filter coffee lovers, rejoice! Drinking 3 cups of it may keep diabetes at bay

If you happen to be one of those who just can’t do without their daily fix of caffeine, here’s a bit of good news for you. According to a latest study, published in the journal of Internal Medicine, drinking three cups of filter coffee may help reduce the risk of developing type-2 diabetes. As intriguing as it may sound, the researchers found out that this revelation is only valid for filtered coffee and not the boiled coffee.

The study offers new insight into this connection and shows that the choice of preparation method influences the health effects of coffee.

The researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and Umea University in Sweden used certain biomarkers for the study.

Also read: This is what drinking too much coffee can do to your body

“We have identified specific molecules – ‘biomarkers’ – in the blood of those taking part in the study, which indicate the intake of different sorts of coffee. These biomarkers are then used for analysis when calculating type-2 diabetes risk,” said study researcher Rikard Landberg, Professor at Umea University.

“Our results now clearly show that filtered coffee has a positive effect in terms of reducing the risk of developing type-2 diabetes. But boiled coffee does not have this effect,” Landberg added.

In combination with classic dietary questionnaires, a new technique called metabolomics was used in order to differentiate the diabetes risk for boiled and filtered coffee.

The findings of the study suggest that people who drank two to three cups of filtered coffee a day had a 60 per cent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes than people who drank less than one cup of filtered coffee a day.

“Metabolomics is a fantastic tool, not just for capturing the intake of specific foods and drinks, but also for studying the effects that that intake has on people’s metabolism. We can derive important information on the mechanisms behind how certain foods influence disease risk,” said study lead author Lin Shi.

According to various previous studies, boiled coffee is often claimed to be infamous for its ability to increase the risk of heart and vascular diseases, due to the presence of diterpenes. As per the researchers of this particular study, coffee doesn’t only have negative effects on health.

“It has been shown that when you filter coffee, the diterpenes are captured in the filter. As a result, you get the health benefits of the many other molecules present, such as different phenolic substances. In moderate amounts, caffeine also has positive health effects,” Landber said.

Apart from this, the study also revealed that the health effects of coffee do not solely depend on whether it is filtered or not. Other factors like how the coffee beans are, and the drink is in general, also come into play.

With inputs from IANS

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