EATING OUT TIP: Coffee

Next time you’re on your way to work, take a second to look around and see how many people have coffees in there hand. Today, takeaway coffees are almost like a fashion accessory and you can buy anything from a latte to a frappuccino blended crème with cream on top! There’s also a range of sizes to choose from – regular, large and extra large. And the number of people that head for the extra large coffee to help get them through the busy working day is amazing. That’s a lot of milk!

Most of us know what’s in the average coffee – a latte has a shot of coffee with milk, a long black is coffee and water, while a cappuccino is a shot of coffee with milk topped with froth and dusted with chocolate powder. But what about the fancy coffee bars such as Starbucks, Hudson's and Gloria Jean, that add caramel sauce or top your drinks with cream? What’s exactly in them?

Going through the Starbucks nutritional analysis found on their website, a lot things were revealed about the world’s most popular drug. With three sizes of cups to choose from, the Tall contained 360ml, the Grande held 480ml and the Venti varied from 600ml to 750ml depending on what drink you order. There are three types of milk to choose from – skim, reduced fat and full cream milk. It’s amazing how many extra kilojoules you consume if you choose the full cream milk over the other two.

Consuming a Starbucks Tall whole milk café latte will give you 756kJ compared to the same sized latte made with skim milk that contains 420kJ. That’s 336kJ extra for every full cream coffee you have, and if you have one every day of the year, you will consume an extra 122,640kJ per year which is equivalent to an extra 28kg (in theory, increasing or decreasing your energy requirements by 4286kJ per week equals a 1kg weight increase or decrease respectively). And that’s not including the sugar that you add.

Choosing the different sized coffees can also add the kilos on the waistline, pushing the belt buckle to bursting point. Choosing a tall skim latte provides you with 420kJ, but if you bump that up to a Venti, you consume a total of 714kJ. If you make that a tall full cream latte you get 756kJ and the Venti would contain 1218kJ. These numbers might not sound like much to you, but think about how many kilojoules a snack should contain. A snack should be less than 600kJ and if you normally have a coffee with your a dnack such as a muffin, you can easily see where those extra kilos you're gaining are coming from.

There is also the option of adding caramel syrup or other syrups to your coffee. Depending on the size of the coffee you choose, this adds an extra 84kJ to 210kJ per coffee. Top your drink with whipped cream and there's another 252kJ to 294kJ of extra kilojoules.

When you really analyse the fancy coffee you get from coffee shops and compare it to how many coffees people have a day and within a year, you can quite easily see how an obesity epidemic can start. Of course, you can have coffee, but choose the smallest size and preferably from a coffee shop, not the fancy coffee bars. Limit the amount of extras you add and enjoy the coffee's bitter taste instead of hiding it behind sugar. Oh, and if you can't drink skim milk, try reduced fat instead of full cream.