Sweeteners- The Trojan Horse for Getting Fatter

There was a news piece today that talks about the amount of sweetener (sugar and sugar-like substances) that are in the drug that most of us drink every day - Coffee (and the article covers more than coffee like Iced Frappe and Macha tea).

I was very surprised to learn that a Medium Tim Horton's "Double Double" (a Canadian Staple) actually has the equivalent of 4 Teaspoons of Sugar and its really 5 teaspoons when you also consider how the added cream impacts your blood sugar.

That is not double 1 teaspoon of sugar to make 2 teaspoons of sugar. That is 5.

We should re-interpret the "double-double" to mean I would like "double my chances for obesity and double my chances for adult-onset type-2 diabetes".


They give a great comparison in the linked article that

"A Cadbury's Caramilk bar has 240 calories and 26 grams of sugar, while a medium double-double has 200 calories and 21 grams of sugar. "

I had never thought before that I was essentially drinking a chocolate bar and it is not just the calories in that particular snack, it is the impact that those 240 calories of mostly sugar have on my insulin and how my body must process them (versus 240 calories of Fat or Protein).

Back to the coffee though, I wouldn't walk into a store three times a day and order a chocolate bar, especially if I was trying to do any kind of weight loss. Why would I every consider doing it with a beverage?

This comes back to something that I have reconsidered since I decided to start losing weight by changing what I was eating and drinking. One of my new behaviors I decided to try was to stop drinking my calories. Changing from Coffee with Sugar and Cream, to Coffee with just cream, to ultimately just black coffee likely means that I have dropped 600-800 calories a day from my regular diet. It also means that I don't have constantly raised insulin levels tied to my body needing to deal with the carbs that I just consumed. I am not triggering my body to store energy every couple of hours.

And we wonder why we are all getting fatter (and sicker)...



Here's Link to the original article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-coffee-chain-drinks-1.6244149

Go have a read...



Want to dig into more of Tim Hortons Menu? (not picking on you Tim Hortons - you are no worse than any other fast-food joint).

here is all the nutritional information they provide from their website in a PDF format.
https://www.timhortons.ca/nutrition-and-allergens
leads to
https://cdn.sanity.io/files/czqk28jt/prod_th_ca/ff39c0831a1fca38b701622ad394ca86c44ed211.pdf

If you want to examine it for Carbs/Sugar, you can simply import it into MSFT Excel (or google sheets) using Data->GetData and magically you can sort it.

like, did you know that a X-Large Hot Chocolate has 500 calories and 108 grams of Carbs of which 76 grams are from Sugar (that is 76/5 grams per teaspoon or 15 teaspoons of sugar).

Let me say that again,
If you give your kid an x-large hot chocolate, you are drinking a BigMac in calories