Warning: Coffee and Fast Food Don't Mix

JP brought to my attention on Twitter a new medical study out of the University of Guelph, looking at the effects of a combination of fast food and coffee on the human body.  The U of G is located in Ontario, Canada, and the news of their study has been making the international rounds this week.

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Rest assured you'll get a layman's medical explanation of the study from me, so here goes...[ad#Google Adsense - use me]There are two kinds of naturally occurring fats...saturated and non-saturated.  There are health benefits to including non-saturated fats in your diet, like those found in nuts.  But, saturated fats are nasty and harder for the body to process.  Saturated fat has been linked to heart disease, cholesterol levels, and everything else that makes good tasting food bad.  The only thing worse are trans-fats, which are man-made and very difficult for the body to process. One of the known problems with saturated fats is that when you eat them, it makes it more difficult for the body to remove sugar content from your blood.  After a high-fat meal, a person's blood-sugar level can potentially jump "to levels similar to those of people at risk for diabetes".  Aside from the extra work that you need to do to burn the fat that your body stores, this increased blood-sugar level leads to even more problems.The new study finds that for as difficult as it is for the body to reduce blood-sugar after we ingest a high-fat meal, that process is even more difficult when coffee is consumed.  This applies even hours after the meal.  My thoughts and questions...- Another great argument not to drink fast-food coffee.  When you stop at the McDonald's drive-thru, you're probably getting more than just a cup of their coffee.  But surprisingly, the Egg McMuffin has only 5 grams of saturated fat compared to 13 grams of saturated fat in the Tim Horton's Breakfast Sandwich.- Stop eating fast-food.  I'm not happy to hear that there are detrimental effects to drinking coffee, but my first thought is that it makes something bad that much worse.  Cut out the saturated fat so you can properly enjoy a coffee.  We should be limiting our intake of saturated fat anyway.- The study isn't clear about whether it's the caffeine or the coffee that's the problem.  I'm asking myself this question because if an energy drink cocktail is just as bad, then I think the real lesson is don't try to artificially alert yourself while you're eating saturated fats.  The caffeine will offset the sluggishness of a big fatty meal, but with risk to your good health. I used to follow medical studies related to coffee but I often found them inconclusive or even contradictory with each other.  The last I wrote on coffee and medicine was almost a year ago.

• Read: Coffee and Migraines

It's not that I don't take these studies seriously, it's just hard to consider a single study credible.  I like to hear it from more than once source.  But having said that, the obesity epidemic is as widely reported as ever...maybe this latest study sheds some light, considering as a society how much coffee we drink and fast food we eat.