The film Supersizeme made a good case for why a diet consisting entirely of McDonalds food could transform your body quicker than Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Recently evidence suggests that the main culprit may not be fatty food, but sugared, caffeinated water. The beverage industry is scheduled to announce today that it is voluntarily removing high-calorie soft drinks from all schools.
This may not be entirely fair. An average 12 ounce can of cola typically contains 120 calories. However its not just sodas that pack in the calories, fruit juices have more and the same size serving of grape juice, an elementary-school lunchroom staple, contains a whopping 165 calories.
It doesn’t really matter how healthy, natural or traditional the drink may seem when you are eating or drinking too much. Despite marginal differences in the way we digest different foods, the bottom line is that calories in = calories out, and unfortunately there is a tendency to think that drinks don’t count in the same way that food does.
So what about coffee? A Starbucks Cappuccino manages to combine fat with caffeinated sugared water by adding milk, combining all of the ingredients in a fast food meal into one nasty-tasty little package.
The combination of three principal food vices with a habitual daily buying pattern that makes ordering a Grande Latte as automatic as taking a morning shit is clearly a money earner. A ritual morning coffee even facilitates the shit.
In a report whose findings are ’something of a mystery,” according to Richard Suzman of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the latest Journal of the American Medical Association shows that despite spending twice as much per person ($5200) on healthcare, Americans have more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer than the English, with middle class Amercans having the same health profile as blue collar English. The English probably shouldn’t smile about it - on account of their teeth, of course.
Diet seems to be the problem - and drinks may be what are tipping the balance - because they don’t seem to count, but they do.
White bread was our top source of calories as recently as ten years ago. People living in America now take in more calories from soft drinks than from any other category of food, about 10% of daily intake, on average, compared to white bread at 6%.
50 years ago, in the days of the classic Raymond Loewy Coke bottle, the average size of a soda was 6 to 8 ounces, today it is 12 ounces and a 64 ounce soda can be bought at most convenience stores or movie theaters.
But while everyone blames White Bread America,, fast food and soda in school, what about Frappucino America? After all, as teh finding says, the health problems are across all income levels.
The smallest Cappuccino size in Starbucks, the ‘Tall’ is the same size as a can of Soda, (12 oz), and has almost exactly the same number of calories: 120. A Starbucks Grande is 33% larger at 16 oz and a ‘Venti’ is 80% larger at 20 oz.
The Economist magazine publishes the Big Mac index (the average cost of a Big Mac in various parts of the world) as a normalized measure of the cost of living.
Lets take the same item to create an easily visualizeable measure of calories in drinks vs food to see whether you should be treating your morning drink as a coffee flavored desert rather than a desert flavored coffee.
A BigMac has 576 calories = 100% BigMac.
Lets see how coffee weighs in on the BigMac Index.
A Starbucks Capuccino: Tall 120 calories - 21% BigMac; Grande 150 - 26% BigMac; Venti 180 - 31% Big Mac.
Other Grandes: latte: 260 - 45% BigMac; caramel Frappuccino: 310 - 54% BigMac; mocha: 400 - 69% BigMac; caramel mocha with whipped cream: 470 - 82% BigMac
But If you really want to think how bad your morning coffee may be for you if you don’t count it as food:
A Venti Chocolate Malt Frappuccino with whipped cream has about as many calories as a BigMac AND Fries (760 calories - 132% BigMac).
Source.
