Diabetes coffee tea type 2If you're a dedicated coffee drinker, you now have grounds to savor your daily cups a bit more. A large has found that people who drink three to four cups of regular or decaf coffee a day have a substantially lower risk of type 2 diabetes than people who drink less. But tea drinkers needn't despair: They, too, have a reduced risk, the researchers say. 

Rates of type 2 diabetes are climbing dramatically around the globe. By 2025 the number of people with the disease is expected to increase by 65 percent to 380 million people. Not surprisingly, a lot of research is being done to find ways to reduce people's risk. Some studies have found that those who drink lots of coffee or tea seem less likely to develop the disease. Researchers have now pooled the results of the best of these studies. In total, they looked at 18 trials with nearly 458,000 people. Here's what they found.

• People who drank three to four cups of regular coffee a day had about a 25 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those who drank zero to two cups. On average, people's risk decreased by 7 percent with each additional cup of coffee they drank a day.
• For decaffeinated coffee, people who drank more than three to four cups per day had a 36 percent lower risk than those who drank none.