Those new McDonald’s Mocha Frappes taste so good – too good. And so addicting. After a few trips through the drive-through wondering what was in them, I asked. The answer: “It’s an iced coffee.”

Iced coffee can’t be that bad, right? Well, maybe if the whipped cream and chocolate topping were eliminated it might not be too bad?

Meanwhile a relative was told by his doctor, “You have the worst case of insulin resistance that I have seen in my 20 year career.” Ouch…major dietary changes are on the way at his household. But where does he start?

Maybe with the high fructose corn syrup?

An article titled “Calorie Restriction NOT Key to Increasing Life, Lowering Insulin Level Is” caught my eye this morning on www.drmercola.com. “For an excellent, in-depth review of just how damaging sugar (especially fructose) is to your health, please watch this lecture by Dr. Lustig if you haven’t done so already. It’s a shocking eye-opener that explains the many intricacies of how sugar impacts your health.”

Robert H. Lustig, MD, is UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology. His You Tube video is 1 hr and 29 minutes in length, and it may very well save your life. Here is a sampling of what you will learn from the video:

• We each weigh 25 pounds more today than we did 25 years ago. We even have an obesity epidemic with our six month olds.

• Leptin is a hormone that says to the brain, “I have eaten enough.” The mechanism is not working.

• Fat intake has gone down, yet the percentage of obesity has gone up. Something else is happening. What is it?

• The “Coca Cola Conspiracy” – Consume one 20 oz coke a day = 26 lbs of fat per year. A 44 oz guzzler = 56 lbs of fat per year. Coke contains caffeine and sodium. Caffeine is a diuretic that eliminates free water. Caffeine + sodium = you are thirstier. The combination of the two is by design.

• There is a significant rise in Type II Diabetes related to sugar consumption.

• High fructose corn syrup is sweeter and cheaper – and is in almost all processed foods.

• We each consume 63 pounds of high fructose corn syrup per year.

• Sucrose is the same thing as high fructose corn syrup.

• “Fructose is a poison. We are being poisoned.”

• “Fat is going down and sugar is going up, and we are all getting sick.”

• Nixon’s war on poverty? We are still suffering the effects today. In 1975 came the introduction of high fructose corn syrup. It is cheap, about ½ the price of sugar, so it has found its way in to almost everything – hamburger buns, pretzels, almost everything. It is being added to every processed food.  “We are being poisoned by this stuff.”

• Most recent data: we are up to 141 lbs of sugar per year – each of us.

• Fast food = fiber-less food, fast cooking, fast eating.

• Fructose alone causes the metabolic syndrome that we see today.

Back to that Mocha Frappe? I wonder how much sugar is in it? A Google search produced the following. Hmmm,  it looks like there is more in there than “iced coffee.”

In 12oz

Calories	450	Sodium	130 mg
Total Fat	20 g	Potassium	0 mg
Saturated	13 g	Total Carbs	62 g
Polyunsaturated	0 g	Dietary Fiber	1 g
Monounsaturated	0 g	Sugars	56 g
Trans	1 g	Protein	7 g
Cholesterol	55 mg
Vitamin A	15%	Calcium	20%
Vitamin C	0%	Iron	4%

The bottom line? Read the labels. Avoid processed foods. Avoid sweetened drinks, including juice.

Yeah, and avoid those “iced coffee” Mocha Frappes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 8:52 am and is filed under Weight Gain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.