This is a bit of a departure for me in terms of how I write my posts on our clinic blog. Today, my family and I went to breakfast at a great place in Ortonville called Dan’s Country Coney. They make the best omelets.
Anyway, as we were there eating, another family came in a sat a couple of tables from us. When they ordered, the father ordered a Coke for his 6-yr-old son (I’m guessing his age based upon his size)!
Frankly, several things ran through my head. First, as a doctor I consider this child abuse. They might as well have let him eat a pack of SweetTarts or M&Ms for breakfast along with it. Heck, why not let him go outside with his dad for a smoke? As a parent, I wanted to say something to the parents, but I figured it would come out incredibly rude.
The reason I’m blogging about this is because I hit a breaking point in my head. This was the third incident of this that I’d seen or heard secondhand in the last week. We as a society have to understand that these habits are going to SEVERELY reduce our children’s life span and quality of life. I actually am starting to have a rough time finding children running around the mall who aren’t clinically obese.
Back to the story at hand. All of the fat cells that we produce as human beings will be made by the time we hit around age 8. Thereafter, we don’t increase the number of fat cells; our fat cells just inflate as we take in too many calories. Giving children sugar, and especially high fructose corn syrup, increases the number of fat cells their bodies produce. Hence, as adults, they are more prone to developing diabetes and other obesity-related disorders because they have more fat cells with which to store fat.
To take this a step further, our bodies cannot process high fructose corn syrup because it is a laboratory-created chemical. However, that doesn’t stop our bodies from trying to break it down. In this process, our pancreas produces much higher amount of insulin in an effort to break it down. Insulin, as most people don’t realize, is a fat storage hormone. Many researchers believe that over the course of one’s life, the less insulin he/she produces, the longer he/she will live, and with a much higher quality of life. Once insulin is created, it binds to sugar and high fructose corn syrup and transfers it to fat cells to be stored, either as fat (sugar) or as a toxin (high fructose corn syrup). Yes! High fructose corn syrup is a toxin!!! I don’t care what the TV commercials say (you know…the ones produced by the corn growers associations) about how it’s okay in moderation. No it isn’t! That’s like saying rat poison is okay in small amounts. I don’t think the rats would agree.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Dr. Morningstar
