Drinking more coffee or tea reduces your risk of developing type II diabetes, the 'lifestyle' disease, a new study has found. People who drink three or four cups of tea or coffee every day were far less likely to develop the disease compared to people who drank up to two cups a day.
Overall, one extra cup a day equated to a 7 per cent reduced risk of diabetes, say researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia. But they don’t think the protective effect is just from the caffeine, because decaffeinated coffee seemed to work just as well.
Instead, they think that other compounds in tea and coffee – such as magnesium and antioxidants – could be responsible. They made the discovery after pooling the results of 18 studies that involved 457,922 people.
(Source: Archives of Internal Medicine, 2009; 169: 2053-63).