To prevent diabetes you will get a real jolt when you follow the prescription offered up in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This prestigious organization reported on separate studies of coffee drinkers in Sweden and Finland.

Whiz-bang medical researchers discovered that women could decrease their risk of diabetes by 29 percent when they followed a regimen of drinking three to four cups of coffee a day.

The ladies who had the fortitude to drink 10 or more cups of coffee a day fared even better. They reduced their risk of diabetes by 79 percent.

The men participating in the studies also reduced their risk, but not to the extent as did the women.

When men drank three to four cups a day, they reduced their risk of diabetes by 27 percent. The men who drank 10 or more cups of java per day reduced their risk by 55 percent.

These results confirm a January report by the equally prestigious Harvard School of Public Health. That report concluded that drinking six 8-ounce cups of coffee a day could reduce diabetes risk in men by about 50 percent and in women by 30 percent.

If the numbers have any connection to reality, the more coffee you drink, the better off you are. And that is the rub.

The numbers have nothing to do with reality, nothing to do with the truth.

Here in America the rate of adult-onset diabetes, or Type 2 diabetes, is growing incrementally. Nowadays it typically shows up in middle-age populations, but the disease is on the rise among ever-younger age groups.

Do not step up your coffee consumption in the belief it will help you prevent diabetes. This disease has absolutely nothing to do with a lack of coffee drinking.

Science and truth are not synonymous. Medical scientists do not deal with truth. The medical scientists who monkey around with coffee drinking merely play with limited and approximate descriptions of reality. In this case, extremely limited and hardly approximate.

If you are serious about preventing diabetes, you have to look at the differences between the people of the past who did not get diabetes, and the people of today who get diabetes. This entails more than merely harping on the fact the younger generation is becoming more overweight and less active.

We have plenty of newly discovered diabetics who are active and on the thin sideand they drink lots of coffee.

The primary difference between the people of the past who did not get sick and die like we do, and the present lot who become diabetics, is poor nutritional status.

The diabetic-in-process has an inadequate intake of nutrients and/or excessive intake of nutrient-poor foods. Conversely, his/her healthy ancestors had a nutrient-dense diet.

The nutrient-dense diet of the past contained, minimally, four times the amount of minerals, and ten times the amount of fat-soluble vitamins found in the American diet of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Folks who learn where health comes from and practice prevention wont become diabetic, and will not need the medical community dosing them with coffee, or any other magic bullet.