By Allison Aubrey, NPR

If you go back to the 1970s, people with a serious coffee habit often had an accompanying habit: smoking.

And that’s why early studies gave coffee a bad rap. Clearly, smoking was harmful. And it was hard for researchers to disentangle the two habits. “So it made coffee look bad in terms of health outcomes,” Harvard researcher Mehr Stampfer explained to me.

But, fast forward a quarter century and the rap on coffee began to change.

As we’ve reported, recent meta-analysis studies have found that people who drink coffee regularly are at lower risk of depression, and perhaps Alzheimer’s too.

Now, there’s further evidence that coffee also helps cut the risk of developing type-2 diabetes. In the most recent , researchers found that drinking two or more cups of coffee per day was associated with a 12 percent decreased risk of developing the disease. And even decaffeinated coffee seemed to cut the risk, though not as much as the caffeinated kind.

Of course, the most significant risk factor for type-2 diabetes is weight. And, indeed, the study found that coffee’s protective effect didn’t seem to hold up as well in overweight people.

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