The Dangers of Customizable Coffee
The New Icecream
Coffee with your sugar?
Leave it to corporate America to take something good for you and transform it into a liability for your health.
After all, they’ve taken healthy, thick hamburgers and shrunk them to cookie-sized overcooked pucks, mixed in a bunch of hormone-laced soy by-products, slathered them with sugary ketchup and served them up on ever-larger buns.
They’ve taken raw milk and skimmed off the healthy animal fat, boiled all the nutrition out of it, and pumped it full of additives (starting with drugging the poor cows). They’ve also taken the artery-boosting alcohol out of beer, the nutrient-loaded yolks out of eggs, and the Omega-rich oil out of peanut butter, for Pete’s sake!
And the latest in this ever-growing list of originally healthy consumables that the food-and-drink industry profit machine has largely transformed into fattening, nutrition-less junk is one of my all-time favorites: Coffee.
It wasn’t all that long ago when there were only 2 kinds of coffee: With cream or without. A full cup of black coffee without cream had less than 10 calories. Add a splash of heavy cream and it totaled only 30 or so calories. And when it was freshly brewed, said “Cuppa Joe” packed as much healthy, cancer-fighting antioxidants as 3 fresh oranges.
That was back before some pointy-headed, bean-counting MBA somewhere figured out that they could sell coffee like ice cream – customizable in a bunch of sizes and with every conceivable kind of topping, and in every flavor under the sun. From a profit and marketing perspective, this was a stroke of genius, but from a health standpoint, it’s a disaster!
A quick visit to the Starbucks Coffee website reveals numerous varieties of both hot and cold coffees that top 250 calories a cup. Some even exceed 500 calories – before added toppings, which include chocolate, whipped cream (and not the good kind, I’ll wager), caramel, malt, flavored syrups, sprinkles and more. And since the coffee itself only accounts for 10-30 calories of this, the rest of it is more or less solid sugar! They’re not really selling coffee, they’re selling dessert.
No matter how healthy or antioxidant-rich the coffee and caffeine underneath all that sugar is, I’d never recommend drinking them. Keep reading
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To put this all in perspective, 500 calories is nearly as much as a double-dip of most Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, 3 Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts, or a full-sized malted milk shake! Conversely, two whole chicken breasts with the skins, fried in batter are only around 450 calories. A typical half-pound hamburger – bun, trimmings and all – totals just a shade over 500 calories.
My point is this: Poor health choices come at us from all angles – even the most innocuous-seeming. Everybody counts calories in the foods they eat, but don’t consider how fat they’re getting from the things they’re drinking. When you go to Starbuck’s or some other “gourmet coffee” caf, you run the risk of consuming the equivalent of 3 full-sugar Cokes if you’re not careful about what you order.
And don’t even get me started on the prices of these coffee-flavored confections. It’s easy to spend 5 bucks on a cup of coffee in one of these joints! That’s a far cry from the buck-a-cup-with-free-refills you can still get at the local diner or Mom-and-Pop coffee shop on the corner. One article I read recently even focused on the financial impact a thousand-dollar-a-year gourmet coffee habit is having on already-deep-in-debt law students!
Imagine that: When budgeting for college, in addition to tuition, books, room and board and food and clothing, you’ve got to allow another grand per year for COFFEE!?! Ridiculous.
Frivolous, unhealthy, overpriced or not, the service counter is packed for much of the day in most of the Starbucks stores I’ve been in. And if the 5-year trend in their stock price is any indication, they aren’t going anywhere. But the people that go there every day sure are going somewhere
Into the poor house and an early grave!
Never “desserting” my drinking duties,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
