Blackberries, two cups–low in fat and calories, loaded with anti-oxidants, a health food natural.
Green tea, two cups–low in fat and calories, loaded with anti-oxidants, a health food natural.
Starbucks’ Blackberry Green Tea Frappuccino® Blended Crème, whip, two cups–560 calories, 15 grams of fat, a health food natural wannabe.
In all fairness, Starbucks offers the Blackberry Green Tea Frappuccino Blended Crème with no whip, returning its stats to a “mere” 430 calories with a more reasonable 2.5 grams of fat.
The point, however, is that America has been consumed with a coffee bar obsession which may directly conflict with its health and weight loss obsessions.
Coffee–fragrant, hot, steaming, stimulating coffee–is still available at every coffee bar and fast food restaurant for a mere 5 calories per cup. But how much fun is that for a connoisseur?
And in an effort to keep their customer bases coming back for more, America’s better known coffee vendors have come up with some delightful concoctions, with tastes as rich as the sounds of their names.
For example:
Dunkin Donuts’ Dunkin’ Donuts Vanilla Bean Coolatta tops out at 440 calories and 17 fat grams, of which 15 are saturated fat. That’s per two-cup serving.
A Burger king medium vanilla shake, in comparison, has 430 calories, but only 8 fat, and 5 saturated fat, grams.
In other words, you could drink four Burger King medium vanilla shakes before you hit your recommended daily intake of saturated fats; but you could only drink one-and-one-quarter 16-ounce Vanilla Bean Coolattas.
What can you do to keep your designer coffee and your waistline too? A little research on the nutrition in your favorite coffee creations would go a long way to keep you from weighty mistakes. Just Google the name of the chain, and “nutrition chart”.
But for starters, whether you do research or not, stay with the non-fat, or, if you must have cream, the smallest version of your coffee beverage of choice. No sugar, or if it’s a syrup-flavored coffee drink, a sugar-free syrup to help keep the calorie count down as well.
Blackberries and green tea? Go right ahead.
