Calorie Content Of Coffee
Due to globalization and franchising, coffee has gone a long way from its basic black form. Now there are different kinds of coffee available in your favorite coffee bar/shop or supermarket.
The steep competition spawned different variations and kinds of coffee from all over the world are introduced into the coffee shops today and completely altered the basic calorie content of coffee.
Before all these changes, a plain cup of brewed coffee contained zero fat, zero calories and was composed primarily of carbohydrates, sugars and proteins.
Nowadays the coffee shops that we use for business meetings, meet-ups, hang-outs and dates have “gourmet coffee” which contains significantly higher amount of fat, excessive sugar and other ingredients that make our coffee unique and of course more delicious and these changes have significantly increased the calorie content of basic black coffee.
Gourmet coffees have emerged from different variations: cold, hot, whipped, flavored, frozen, fruit-mixed, and other gimmicks that increased and altered the normal low calorie content of coffee. All of these changes incorporate additional ingredients from sugar, creams and syrups that increased the calorie content of coffee!
These “extras” increased the amount of calories in coffee significantly.
The highest contributors of additional calories are whipped cream, sugar and syrups.
(Not to mention the additional chocolate and fruit mix.)
Medium gourmet coffee cups in a coffee shop are pegged to contain around 200 calories (for the lowfat one) to around 550 calories per cup. These are usually the rate for the medium size cups but if you upsize your drink, it may easily increase to around 600 to 900 calories per cup.
So, how do you lessen the calories while hanging out at your favorite coffee shop?
For starters, opt for skim milk and skip the whip cream (which contains around 90-150 calories of saturated fat.)
Another way is opting to put the sugar in yourself to control the amount you place in your coffee. (Most shops have 5-12 teaspoons of sugar for the big cups)
It is also helpful to skip the pastry that you usually eat along with your favorite cup of coffee.