By: Paul Xiong and Igor Klibanov
So you’re a diabetic who wants to improve your blood glucose levels. You like coffee and are curious whether it’s harmful or beneficial for diabetes.
You’ve tried to find answers online, but you’re getting a lot of conflicting information about coffee, such as:
● Caffeine may affect insulin activity and cause an increase in blood sugar levels or the opposite effect
● Magnesium and chromium in coffee can improve your condition
● Telling you to drink or not to drink it
…and so on. You’re not sure what to do with all of this information, but you want to know definitively if coffee is good or bad.
Well, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, you can expect to learn:
● What is and isn’t inside coffee
● Benefits and drawbacks of drinking coffee in general
● Is coffee effective at preventing diabetes?
● Is coffee good or bad for diabetes?
● And the bottom line: should you drink coffee?
But, before we begin, allow me to introduce myself!
Hi!
My name is Igor Klibanov. I am the proud author of 8 books on exercise and nutrition, including the Amazon bestseller, Type 2 Diabetes Reversal Secrets. I am also a certified personal trainer who specializes in helping clients (like Mandy, John, and others) reverse their type 2 diabetes.
So, without further ado, let’s get started with our first topic:
What is Coffee Made Of?
Caffeine is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of what makes up coffee. Yes, caffeine is what coffee is famous for, but it contains far more ingredients and chemicals than you might expect, like:
● Certain Polyphenols – a plant compound that is a type of antioxidant that provides benefits like preventing blood clots and lowering heart disease risk.
● Chlorogenic acid – a polyphenol that may have potential health benefits like anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, and other effects.
● Cafestol and kahweol (also both polyphenols) – can reduce inflammation by regulating several inflammatory mediators. They can also help prevent cancer by suppressing carcinogen activation and improving liver detoxification.
● Trigonelline – has therapeutic potential as a hypoglycemic and neuroprotective chemical, as well as anticarcinogenic qualities.
…and many others.
Coffee is not simply caffeine. The combination of these chemicals may be beneficial for boosting insulin sensitivity, which may help to address the negative effects of coffee (which we’ll get into later). This is something coffee drinkers don’t usually think about.
However, one common myth is that magnesium and chromium found in coffee ‘supposedly’ help with your diabetes.
Myth: Magnesium and Chromium in Coffee
While it’s true that the 2 ingredients do exist in coffee, most don’t exactly state the all-important question of “how much?” And to answer that question, almost nothing.
According to the USDA nutrition database, one cup of coffee contains roughly 7 mg of magnesium. If you compare that to the daily requirements which are roughly 300-500 mg, you would need to drink about 42 cups of coffee a day (which is obviously not good for you)!
But most importantly, magnesium does not have any positive effect on blood sugar levels (but also not bad, and good for many other reasons). Chromium, however, does help but isn’t even listed on the database because of how little there is in coffee.
So, if any of the sites you looked at previously said this, they’re wrong.
Just like magnesium and chromium, many ingredients in coffee provide different effects, and you might be wondering: what are the positives and negatives of drinking coffee?
What are the Effects of Coffee?
Before you consider drinking coffee, you should understand its benefits, drawbacks, and areas where it’s neutral.
Some benefits include:
● Better endurance. A study showed groups drinking caffeine and coffee were faster in endurance exercise, by 6.5% and 5.4%, respectively.
● Lower risk of depression in people who consumed 68-509 mg/day of caffeine. The more coffee consumed, the lower the risk, up to 400 mg/day. Too much caffeine is excessive so limit the caffeine intake to about 400 mg/day (that’s about 4 cups of coffee a day).
● Decreased risk of steatohepatitis
● Decreased risk of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer
● Increased muscular endurance and a decreased perception of effort
● Increased cardiovascular performance
○ On average, caffeine increases time to exhaustion by 24.2%
○ On average, caffeine decreases time to completion by 3.1%
The downsides are:
● Increase in anxiety and insomnia. It’s not likely to give you anxiety if you don’t already have it, but if you have pre-existing anxiety, it’s likely to make it worse.
● Higher risk of irritable bowel syndrome. A study tested when more than 106.5mg of caffeine is consumed each day, the risk of developing IBS increases by 47%.
● May cause or aggravate heartburn
● Increases the rate of bone loss in some people, which leads to osteoporosis
● Worsen premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in young women
● May cause headaches and migraines
And then the neutral side:
● Coffee intake and caffeine supplements don’t improve your physical strength, as measured by the one-repetition max (1RM)
● No negative or positive effects of coffee on cardiovascular health
● Coffee intake quickens gastric emptying (ie… coffee makes you poop. But I bet you knew that already 😉 )
● Coffee intake does not dehydrate you, contrary to another popular myth, spread by ignoramuses.
Remember, we’re only talking about plain black coffee. Any health benefits are changed when sugar, syrup, and cream/milk are added. And by ‘changed’, I don’t mean it decreases or increases. It just changes things.
Some of the disadvantages are tied to caffeine, so try decaffeinated coffee to obtain the benefits of coffee without the effects of caffeine. Long-term intake of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee has no negative impact on insulin sensitivity.
Coffee has many benefits and drawbacks, but how does coffee intake affect people with diabetes specifically?
Does Coffee Prevent Diabetes?
Coffee’s effects on type 2 diabetes have been studied multiple times. One systematic review showed that coffee consumption has a role in prevention. The results were:
● Those consuming over 6 cups/day had a 35% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes
● Those consuming 4-6 cups/day had a 28% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes
The more coffee people drank, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes. How does this work? According to this meta-analysis, there are at least 4 mechanisms that potentially cause this:
● Mechanism 1: The chlorogenic acid in coffee (also found in decaf) decreases glucose (or sugar) absorption into the blood, resulting in lower blood glucose levels
● Mechanism 2: Contains antioxidants that prevent free radicals, which contribute to health problems
● Mechanism 3: Coffee has anti-inflammatory chemicals that help, since inflammation is one cause of diabetes
● Mechanism 4: Coffee alters the bacteria in the large and small intestines (the microbiome) by limiting the growth of harmful bacteria while increasing the growth of beneficial bacteria
Even if coffee helps prevent diabetes, prevention is different from treatment. Now, for the ultimate question:
Is Coffee Good for Diabetics?
Unfortunately there’s not a single study that answers this question. The only studies on this are observational.
To conclusively give an accurate answer, we require more controlled experiments. To design a study that truly answers this question, here’s what the design would have to look like:
● One group of diabetics drinks coffee for 3 months
● Another group of diabetics drinks water that is flavored like coffee for 3 months. And they are told it’s coffee. That’s the control group.
Both groups would eat the same diet, protein, and calories. After the 3-month period, we would compare each group’s blood sugar levels.
Such a study doesn’t exist.
Because of that, to honestly answer the question “is coffee good for diabetics?” The answer would have to be “we don’t know.” We can speculate, and other authors may lead you to believe that there’s a definitive conclusion. But there isn’t. At least not until such a study is designed.
So on a population basis we can say that we don’t know whether or not coffee is good for diabetics.
But you don’t care how coffee affects the diabetic population in general. You want to know how coffee affects you specifically. That’s a very fast, cheap and accurate experiment you can run on yourself.
How to Test if Coffee Works for You
Coffee affects different people in different ways, and if you want to know for sure if coffee is good for you, run some experiments. Instead of waiting for coffee and diabetes to be studied (if that study will ever be conducted), here are 2 experiments you can try on your own:
For both experiments, you will require a blood sugar monitoring device, or glucometer, which you can get at your local drugstore or pharmacy.
If you don’t know how to use one, here’s a brief video on the procedure.
You are now ready for the experiments.
Experiment 1:
● Step 1: Measure your blood sugar using a glucometer
● Step 2: Drink a cup of regular, black coffee
● Step 3: Measure your blood sugar again at 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes after you drink it Results:
● If coffee increases your blood sugar, it’s probably not the best thing for you
● If coffee didn’t have any impact, it’s probably somewhere between neutral and beneficial ● If coffee lowered high blood sugar, it’s beneficial
Experiment 2:
● Step 1: Measure your blood sugar using a glucometer
● Step 2: Have whatever meal you usually would have, without coffee
● Step 3: Measure your blood sugar again at 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes after you eat the meal
● Step 4: On a different day, repeat steps 1-3 with the same meal, but this time add 1 cup of coffee during step 2
Results:
● If drinking coffee with your meal raises your blood sugar more than the meal alone, it’s probably not the greatest choice for you
● If coffee did not affect blood sugar, the effects are somewhere between neutral and beneficial, and fine to drink
● If coffee lowered your high blood sugar, it’s beneficial
Coffee and Diabetes – The Bottom Line
Coffee has a lot more to it than just caffeine, and also provides many health benefits. However, magnesium and chromium are not part of them.
Some of those benefits are:
● Lower risk of depression
● Lower risk of diseases like steatohepatitis and liver cancers
● Increase in muscular endurance and cardiovascular performance
But there are also several negatives, including:
● Increased anxiety and insomnia
● Higher chance of irritable bowel syndrome and osteoporosis
● More migraines
Decaffeinated coffee may be the best option for people with diabetes because it has the benefits of coffee without some of the bad effects associated with caffeine.
Coffee consumption can prevent the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but it’s a different story for treating it. There is no clear answer whether coffee is good for diabetics, but if you really want to know if you can drink coffee with diabetes, you have 2 experiments you can try. Too much caffeine is not ideal, so, please limit yourself to about 4 cups of coffee a day.
