A cup of coffee in the morning can do wonders for your mental wellness, but it turns out that your physical wellbeing could also be at a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
According to a new Chinese study, there are 3 major compounds in coffee that may provide potentially beneficial effects: caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid and caffeine, and one of these effects may be a reduced risk of diabetes, though researchers warn that this is yet to be fully proven.
Ling Zheng, professor of cellular biology at Wuhan University in China, and colleagues wrote that ‘These findings suggest that the beneficial effects of coffee consumption on type 2 diabetes mellitus may be partly due to the ability of the major coffee components and metabolites to inhibit the toxic aggregation of hIAPP [human islet amyloid polypeptide]’.
Human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP) is usually found in the pancreas, but can sometimes cause abnormal protein deposits to arise and these deposits are found in people with type 2 diabetes. Therefore, the researchers wanted to know whether they could prevent or treat type 2 diabetes by blocking the formation of these deposits, and therefore searched for a substance that might be able to do it.
According to Zheng and study co-author Kun Huang, professor of biological pharmacy at the Huazhong University of Science & Technology in Wuhan, all of the 3 components in coffee helped to reduce the abnormal protein deposits, but caffeic acid appeared most effective: ‘Our results suggest that caffeic acid had the greatest effects in the major components of coffee. The rankings for beneficial effects of coffee compounds against the toxic hIAPP aggregation are caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid and caffeine’.
This could be even truer of decaffeinated coffee, as it contains even higher levels of caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid than caffeinated coffee. However, the investigators pointed out that this work has only been done in cells, so how this translates to the body as a whole is still unclear. Further, Zheng and Huang pointed out that their study looked strictly at coffee, and ‘does not imply that the cream and sugar served with coffee will be beneficial for type 2 diabetes’.