Further Beneficial Links In
Coffee Drinking FoundDate: 2
May 07
Drinking coffee can
help ward off type 2 diabetes and may even help prevent
certain cancers, according to panelists discussing the
benefits -- and risks -- of the beve rage at a scientific
meeting.
"We're coming from a situation where coffee had a very
negative health image," Dr. Rob van Dam of the Harvard
School of Public Health, who has conducted studies on coffee
consumption and diabetes, told Reuters Health. Nevertheless,
he added, "it's not like we're promoting coffee as the new
health food and asking people who don't like coffee to drink
coffee for their health."
Van Dam participated in a "controversy session" on coffee
at the Experimental Biology 2007 meeting underway in
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Lenore Arab of the David Geffen School of Medicine at
UCLA also took part, presenting results of a review of
nearly 400 studies investigating coffee consumption and
cancer risk.
There's evidence, Arab noted, that the beverage may
protect against certain types of colon cancer, as well as
rectal and liver cancer, possibly by reducing the amount of
cholesterol, bile acid and natural sterol secretion in the
colon, speeding up the passage of stool through the colon
(and thus cutting exposure of the lining of the intestine to
potential carcinogens in food), and via other mechanisms as
well.
However, Arab did find evidence that coffee may increase
the risk of leukemia and stomach cancer, with the case for
leukemia being strongest.
The findings suggest that people who may be vulnerable to
these risks -- for example pregnant women and children --
should limit coffee consumption, van Dam noted in an
interview.
He and his colleagues are now conducting a clinical trial
to get a clearer picture of the diabetes-preventing effects
of coffee, which were first reported in 2002. Since then, he
noted, there have been more than 20 studies on the topic.
Van Dam and his team are also looking for which of the
"hundreds to thousands" of components of coffee might be
responsible for these effects. It's probably not caffeine,
he noted, given that decaf and caffeinated coffee have
similar effects on reducing diabetes risk.
His top candidate, van Dam says, is chlorogenic acid, an
antioxidant that slows the absorption of glucose in the
intestines.
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