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Caffeine vs Type II Diabetes
OctaneZ writes "New research out of the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that coffee may lower your risk of Type II Diabetes. Men who drank 6 cups of coffee a day lowered their risk by 50%, while womens risk dropped 30%. The release also includes audio discussions about the suprising findings."
That's super news!
Being that there's coffee in Kahlua I can rest assured that when I have cirrhosis induced jaundice I won't have to suffer through the ravages of Type II diabetes!
oh.. there are only 2 Fs in "Caffeine", Taco. Please get it right when you dupe the story in 2 hours.
Trolling is a art,
"Yay, my lame-ass caffeine 'addiction', that I brag about and wear like a badge of sorry dorkiness, is actually helping my fat-ass sedentary lifestyle!!@"
Ignoring, of course, the fact that while drinking 6 (!!) cups of coffee a day may reduce your risk of Type 2 diabetes (if this resarch is true), it raises your risk for nearly everything else.
men's risk of heart-attack raised 70% and woman's height decreased 25%
RTFA, they aren't sure it's just the caffeine. Decaf had a similar, but lesser, effect. It could also have something to do with all of the antioxidants in coffee.
I wonder if it's because those who drank a lot of coffee throughout the day consumed less refined sugar. Many put some sugar in their coffee, but if they're getting a boost in energy from the coffee maybe they lay off the snacks.
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Men who drank 6 cups of coffee a day lowered their risk by 50%
I drink so much coffee, the people around me must have a lowered risk of diabetes, just by proximity.
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Does drinking 6 cups of coffee a day reduce Type II diabetes
OR
Does drinking 6 cups of coffee a day supress hunger so people eat less, and therefore weigh less, which reduces the chance of Type II diabetes?
In my head, it's more the latter than any "wonder of coffee" - kind of like how a few years ago it was "red wine reduces heart attacks! Drink up, kids!", which then moved to "oh, well, grape juice does the same thing - it's all because of the antioxidants".
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I am hypoglycemic and one thing that really straightens out my blood sugar/insulin is caffeine. When drinking coffee it's a lot more stable and doesn't fluctuate nearly as bad.
Some claim caffeine helps for Parkinsons disease too
I seem to recall a slashdot story from about a year ago that claimed that drinking so much caffeine caused your testicles to shrink.
Aren't there other, more healthy ways to lower your risk of diabetes? Like exercise and eating right? Or is that one of those "things you are not allowed to say" on slashdot?
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I thought it was just that the coffee killed them off so fast they didn't have time to develop the diabetes...
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One thing to note is that a lot of the reports I read saying that coffee leads to diabetes type 2 also imply that the coffee is consumed together with some kind of carbohydrate-laced food, usually cakes or something. It is also equally important to note that there are a large number of athletes and serious exercisers who use coffee as a performance enhancer; they tend to not have diabetes type 2 and they tend not to consume their coffee with performance-undermining cakes.
What I would like to see are more reports taking these factors into account.Compare people who drink just coffee with people who drink coffee and eat cake. Compare people who drink coffee and exercise vigorously on a regular basis with people who drink coffee and sit on the couch all day. Let's get rid of all the double-messages and ambiguities.
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Side effects of caffeine include:
Anger is perhaps the symptom I've seen the most in other people. It's due to the fact that caffeine causes the adrenal glands to dump their load--you feel energized by caffeine specifically because you've gotten an adrenaline rush. But andrenaline also causes anger because it brings on the "fight or flight" syndrome. Therefore one of the worst places to work is in a place with lots of caffine addicts--they tend to get on each others' nerves.
Caffine causes other stress hormones to be released. The net effect is that you end up feeling tired because you've been feeling stressed out by caffeine. Most people end up taking caffeine to deal with caffeine's side effects.
It takes two weeks for caffeine to completely leave your body.
I heard the same thing on NPR yesterday on the news. However, the story I heard only claimed this was a correlation between people who drink coffee and not causation. Scientists found definite figures that coffee drinkers had a lowered risk of type II diabetes, but that no evidence linked it to the coffee.
I'd start listening to the audio links and do research, but I'm stuck at this place called My Job and if anyone else can confirm this I'd appreciate it. The link given is not the official paper with its findings and I'm not sure I trust the person who wrote it.
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Atkins diet. Jeebus H. Christ. I swear if i hear that phrase one more time I'm going to lose it. It's everywhere. Menu's at resturaunts have "Atkins Friendly" sections now.
Whatever ever happened to a balanced diet? Atkins seems to me to be swinging the pendulum more and more away from equilibrium.
Pop culture diets: "Eat no carbs!" "Wait! You need carbs!" "Eat nothing but carbs!" "Wait, carbs are bad!" "Eat only protien!" "Eat anything but barf it up!"
rant not directed towards you, neiffer. just a rant. whatever to get your diabetes in control. People with a medical condition, maybe something like Atkins is a good thing. but for people who think they are fat, and don't want to excercise, a little more balance would seem better.
The statistics were probably skewed from their hearts exploding after beating like a hummingbird on meth.
I don't know about that. I don't think there's ever been any evidence of serious long term health consequences linked to even moderately high caffeine use.
And it's not for lack of trying. Caffeine seems almost too good to be true.
As far as the lameness of caffeine addiction is concerned, coffee has been loved by generations of Sufis, who used coffee in mystic rituals and spread its use across the world; and by many important creative people who picked it up in coffee houses. Beethoven and Rossini were very heavy users by any standard. William Harvey, the disoverer of blood ciruclation, left his coffee paraphernalia to the Royal Society and is said to have declared on his deathbed that the coffee bean was the source of all true happiness (going a bit far I'd say).
Balzac was probably the champion coffee addict of all time, reaching a point of drinking over two hundred cups of coffee a day until he finally gave up and resorted to eating coffee beans directly. He did die of heart failure, but at a reasonable age for his day, and according to his physician from a congential condition.
Coffee is one of those rare pleasures that, even indulged in to the extreme remains quite benign. I'd say stop being so puritanical and enjoy one of nature's gifts.
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Make fun of Atkins all you like, but for those of us that have type II diabetes, it's a powerful tool to control our blood sugar. I've lost enough weight on Atkins that my sugar readings are "normal" as long as I stick to the diet. If I eat more than about 20 grams of carbs at one sitting, or about 45 - 50 grams a day, my blood sugar goes way up. Studies have shown that good sugar control postpones and reduces the onset of diabetic complications. Basicly, the carbs kill diabetics faster than the fat & cholesterol.
Many people mistake Atkins induction level with the "atkins diet". Induction is a 2 week phase. It is not a balanced diet, and you're not supposed to stay on it forever. Atkins at maintenance levels resembles The Zone diet.
There actually is a pretty good rationale for low carb dieting. I'll try to sum up two major lines of evidence:
First, carbs didn't make up a large part of the human diet until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Sugars and starchs are simply not available in large consistenet quantities to hunter/gatherers dominant for the previous 90,000 years. Studies comparing the remains of pre-agricultural people and agricultural people show that diabetes and heart disease only appear in populations once agriculture is introduced. The correlation was shown not to be an effect of lifespan. today, cultures such as the Inuit exist on nearly carb free diets and show a similar absence of diabetes and heart disease.
Second, carbs are nearly instantaneously converted to glucose by the digestive system. Where the digestive system easily discards unneeded fat and protein, glucose enters the blood stream very quickly. Excessively high glucose levels are toxic to the brain, so glucose triggers an insulin response. Insulin triggers the fat cells to remove glucose and store it, and it triggers the liver to remove glucose and store it as cholesterol. By removing the carb component of the diet, the body needs to produce its own glucose. The glycogen response triggers the fat cells to release stored glucose into the blood stream and it triggers the liver to convert cholesterol to glucose. Low carb dieting causes the body to spend most time in a glycogenic state, which means the body is burning fat and cholesterol as fuel. Hence, less fat and cholesterol.
Who the hell do you think you are complaining that we coffee drinkers are angry! Why don't you get off your FSCKING high horse, you god-damned pissant. You can take your whiney little opinions about angry coffee drinkes and stick them where the sun doesn't shine! Bloody health food eating, toad sucking, argument for post-natal abortion.
Interestingly, caffeine also seems to have a neuroprotective effect when it comes to Parkinson's (here's an article even the most java-addled ./er should be able to get through).
Also interesting: nicotine has an even stronger neuroprotective effect against Parkinson's. And what's really weird: smokers metabolize caffeine about twice as fast as nonsmokers (nobody's really sure why). Next time your pretentious smoker buddy starts bragging about how much coffee he cranks, you might mention this. He's got a biochemical advantage.
I don't smoke, and I wouldn't advise doing it as part of your health regimen, but nicotine's interations with caffeine are kind of intriguing.
After 30 years of messing with people's diets, the average citizen is now keenly aware that the medical establishment doesn't know jack shit about what they should eat. People will try anything now.
There is some truth to the Atkins diet, but its now some sick industry. People should just go back to eating the way we did 50 years ago. Just watch a 50's TV show sometime. Get some Depression era photographs. People LOOKED healthy back then. It is very clear.
Remember, the same bureaucrats who created dietary guidelines also revolutionized the educational system and thought housing projects would eliminate poverty. The sad fact is diet fads are one of the last idealistic trends of the 1960's. Like everything else of that era, it was wrong and destructive.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
This AC makes a good point that you can't lump all carbs together. What really causes the problem in today's diets is that most food is processed very heavily. Grain products have the bran and germ (the most nutritious parts) stripped out of them. Fats have been extracted from their raw sources using heat and chemical solvents which fundamentally change the character of the fatty acids (typically breaking down any double bonds between carbon atoms and allowing more hydrogen to get attached leading to saturated fats). Grain products that retain most of the original nutrition such as barley, wild rice, whole wheat bread, etc. should not be lumped together in the class of 'evil' carbs. The heavily processed sugars and starches in our typical diet are bad because they are simply empty calories.
A balanced diet really is the way to go because your body needs so damn many things to work well and counteract the effects of other things you eat. I know some people don't bother eating fruits because they 'can get their vitamins from a pill'. Fruits provide much more than vitamins, however. Pectin, for example, helps your body deal with excess cholesterol. Atkins' dieters love to eat tons of fat and brag about how healthy they are. I know someone who eats fried eggs and bacon every morning for breakfast. Listen, that is not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. First of all, frying eggs hydrogenates them (if you love eggs, try soft-boiling them so that they yolk isn't exposed to the air). Bacon is cured and processed and filled with saturated fats. Good nutritional practices are not as simple as 'eat more fat and less carbs'.
Many of us have seen first hand how people follwing the Atkins and other fad diets lose weight. But the real key to being healthy (as opposed to just fat loss) is to eat a balanced diet filled with fresh, nutrient-dense foods. You can eat a fair meat of meat on such a diet but you had better (a) trim off excess visible fat, and (b) suppliment with essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6 acids found in flax oil, hemp oil, nuts, seeds) to provide your body with the ability to deal with all the cholesterol and saturated fats you'll be taking in. Don't shy away from all carbs but make sure that any carbs you DO decide to take in are from nutrient dense sources. Never eat any type of bread except for 100% whole wheat. Don't use jasmine, white, basmanti or other highly processed rice -- use brown rice, wild rice, or barley. Skip pasta. Don't go crazy on fruits but definitely include some of those every day. And vegetables are essential. That's probably the most nutritious stuff you can find.
Bottom line: good nutrition is quite complicated. Much more so than you will ever hear about in USA Today or CNN. The best thing you can do is eat a balanced diet and reduce your consumption of highly processed foods. I'm not saying you have to run out and starting buying organic produce (lord knows I sure don't) but do realize that our modern society has traded nutrient value of foods for ease of processing and consumption.
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The refined carbohydrates you believe are the cause of Type II diabetes have been consumed now for over 5000 years. This is a disorder that did not even exist 100 years ago, and barely existed 40 years ago. What has changed? Until you explain THAT, everything you think you know is completely irrelevent.
Actually... We've been aware of diabetes at least since the time of the Roman Empire. "Diabetes mellitus" is actually latin for "sweet urine", which was the diagnostic test (yuk!) for the disease back then. In the past, type 1 diabetics didn't survive to adulthood. Type 2 complications take decades to develop, and may be mistaken for other things. Either way, since the average life expectancy was less than 40 5000 years ago, your point is hardly relevant. Most people didn't live long enough for the disease to develop.
I have to live with the disease. Funny... I can eat more rice than I can bread. It doesn't get digested as fast.
I'd love to see your 50 claimed references. You've done a lot of spouting off bullshit in this topic. You have your preconceived position, and you aren't going to let go of it. You're not helping anyone, and we really don't care if you want to feel smarter than everyone else.