Starbucks has 3x the sugar of a whole Coke in some drinks

I&#x27;m not surprised some Starbucks drinks have a ton of sugar, but the 3 cans of Coke worth definitely puts it into perspective.<p>I grew up drinking my coffee with sugar and cream, but eventually stopped using sugar, and then ultimately drinking it black. If you can wean off adding compliments to your coffee, you will most likely acquire a taste for the bitterness of coffee.<p>Once you begin loving the true taste of coffee, it becomes a much more fun experience to try different types of coffee, it&#x27;s much healthier, and taste much better to me (now).

I don&#x27;t know how you could drink some of those Starbucks &quot;coffee&quot; drinks and think they were anything other than milkshakes. There are also some misconceptions around the caffeine content of these coffee drinks. Most espresso is around 30-50mg caffeine per shot, so a 20oz frappacino will have 60-100 mg caffeine vs a 20 oz coffee which will have ~350-400 mg caffeine.

How sad it is that the can of coke is used as a comparison. It almost makes it look like a reasonable drink.<p><i>The World Health Organization has recently suggested cutting the recommended sugar intake for adults in half, to about 25 grams, around 6 teaspoons, of sugar for a normal weight adult a day.</i><p>Here is my favorite site that shows the amounts of sugar cubes in various unhealthy food: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sugarstacks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sugarstacks.com&#x2F;</a><p>According to that information you can drink a half can of coke (most left one in the picture in the link) to satisfy that daily need. That implies that all other food you eat that day will not include any sugar! That is an impossible standard to reach. Solution, don&#x27;t drink drinks with sugar.

What impresses me is decades ago a lot of food chemistry work went into figuring out weird tastes to mask the taste of caffeine and so on. So that&#x27;s why Mt Dew and energy drinks taste the way they do, to cover up the bad flavors, make it drinkable.<p>More recently there must be a lot of research going into how to pack 25 spoons of corn syrup into a drink and still make it drinkable, or even taste good. It is impressive purely from a food science &#x2F; chemistry standpoint, no matter how unhealthy it may be.

This is why I support the FDA&#x27;s effort to get an &quot;Added Sugar&quot; section on the nutrition label. I think it would really help people control their sugar intake:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fda.gov&#x2F;Food&#x2F;GuidanceRegulation&#x2F;GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation&#x2F;LabelingNutrition&#x2F;ucm385663.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fda.gov&#x2F;Food&#x2F;GuidanceRegulation&#x2F;GuidanceDocuments...</a>

The sugar or calories in any particular item generally isn’t a problem. The actual problem is the <i>rate</i> of consumption.<p>People drink stuff like this in ridiculous quantities, and then make it even worse by developing a <i>daily habit</i>. I also find it weird that you don’t often see people set aside “half” of their beverage to finish it later; rather, they sip and sip and sip until it’s gone. By that logic, simply reducing the size of the container that you order should let you drink “all” of it and still feel satisfied. (Or, pour some of it into a cup for immediate consumption, and put the rest away. Same with food.)

&gt; Starbucks said it has committed to reduce added sugar in its &quot;indulgent drinks&quot; by 25% by the end of 2020.<p>IOW, not really. But come on, these drinks are non-necessary items. Who cares? And besides, who looks at something with whipped cream and doesn&#x27;t imagine it being sugar and calorie laden?

Their measurements appear to include whipped cream but this isn&#x27;t mentioned in the article.<p>For example: the pictured Starbucks Venti White Chocolate Mocha is accused of 18tsp sugar but Starbucks nutrition info[1] says 15tsp (55g) sugar without whipped cream.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.starbucks.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;documents&#x2F;nutrition.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.starbucks.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;documents&#x2F;nutrition.pdf</a><p>Edit: incorrect quote

I was never a big coffee drinker, but when I did I&#x27;d drink a &quot;foo-foo&quot; coffee drink which was usually a turtle latte or something similar. I figured if it was only once in a while I was fine.<p>Then I read the nutritional information and nearly fainted: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cariboucoffee.com&#x2F;menu-nutrition&#x2F;beverage-food-detail?id=1475&amp;type=drink" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cariboucoffee.com&#x2F;menu-nutrition&#x2F;beverage-food-d...</a><p>630 calories, 65g of sugar, 21g of saturated fat, 195mg of caffeine.<p>If you do the conversion where 4g of sugar = 1 teaspoon, then this drink has 16.25 teaspoons of sugar which is pretty close to the figures in the article.<p>Needless to say once I read how much sugar was in these drinks, I promptly stopped drinking them altogether.

Yet here in the US we continue to think it&#x27;s good public policy to subsidize the production of sugar and corn syrup.

I&#x27;ve recently started a diet and one of the most helpful things I&#x27;ve been doing is looking up the nutritional facts of meals and drinks that&#x27;d I&#x27;d usually write-off as &quot;too insignificant to matter&quot;. One of those was a medium Starbucks mocha which turned out to be ... ~360 calories without whip. That might seem like an insignificant amount but when you&#x27;re going for a ~600 calorie deficit it&#x27;s about two thirds of a standard meal.<p>Since then I&#x27;ve been sticking to a medium coffee which is ~5 calories, and the caffeine is a total appetite killer. Win win.

I almost collapsed from drinking a white choc mocha from Starbucks about 5 years ago. Body went into full shock mode it was so sweet. Got dizzy, headache, the lot.

It doesn&#x27;t matter which way the calories come in (unless your diet is unhealthy). This concoction has about the same energy density as whole milk.<p>&quot;Don&#x27;t drink your calories&quot;[1] is of course a wise maxim to live by.<p>Source: Starbucks is required by law to make available nutritional value of their drinks, and they do[2], just like any other food producer; use that data if you have problems with your diet.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nutritioninmotionllc.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;dont-drink-calories.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nutritioninmotionllc.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;d...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalassets.starbucks.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;409e621c271444f8b63474b4848ecb21.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalassets.starbucks.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;409e621c271444f8b63...</a>

Here&#x27;s the link to the findings on the Action for Sugar website where you can see the full list of drinks included in their survey:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.actiononsugar.org&#x2F;News%20Centre&#x2F;Surveys%20&#x2F;2016&#x2F;170865.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.actiononsugar.org&#x2F;News%20Centre&#x2F;Surveys%20&#x2F;2016&#x2F;1...</a><p>For comparison, the recommendation from UK scientists is that no more than 5% of daily calories should come from added sugar (approx 7 teaspoons):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;health-33551501" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;health-33551501</a>

I&#x27;m not saying starbucks drinks aren&#x27;t sometimes overloaded with sugar, but aren&#x27;t large drinks at starbucks considerably larger than a can of coke?

You can dissolve up to 2 grams of sugar into every 1 gram of water, Starbucks is just trying to help push the boundaries on that science.

Why is this a surprise? They have nutrition information for all their products on their website. Not news.

What a clickbate...<p>It&#x27;s probably important to note that it&#x27;s not only &quot;flavored&quot; drinks, milk has quite a bit of sugar in it naturally, the &quot;special&quot; milk which is used by some coffee places has about 9% fat and 2-3% carbohydrates which makes it worse than coke on it&#x27;s own, normal whole&#x2F;semi-skimmed&#x2F;skimmed(skimmed usually have higher amounts of sugar to make it not taste like well the water it is) milk has about 5g per 100g of sugar which is more than half the sugar content in coke, so when you add even a &quot;bit&quot; of sugar to a milk based drink you get well more sugar than what coke has for the same volume.<p>It&#x27;s also probably worth noting that a Starbucks &quot;Venti&quot; size is more than double the the volume of a coke can to begin with so about 680ml (espresso shot which is used as the base is only about 30ml) of milk + couple of sugar spoons to make it sweet can easily get to 2-3 times the amount of sugar in coke without even having to go overboard with crap like whipped cream and syrups.

Starbucks has 0% the sugar of a whole Coke in some drinks.

To my taste buds, Nescafe Gold instant coffee blows Starbucks away.<p>Starbucks coffee <i>has</i> to be drowned in sugar and cream to mask the acrid acidity.

They tested the Venti size which is more like a bucket, click-baity header.

Starbucks wins on caffeine by a huge margin, too.

I hate to be &quot;That Guy&quot;, but how is this relevant to Hacker News? Is it just because people who write code also drink coffee?

&#x27;CNN discovers that Starbucks&#x27; &quot;coffee&quot; drinks have insane amounts of sugar in them&#x27;<p>No, really?? Quick, revolt, share on Facebook and choke yourself on kale shakes for breakfast!<p>Welcome to America.

It&#x27;s maybe worth mentioning that Type 2 Diabetes - which is mostly avoidable - can lead to blindness and lower limb amputation.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhs.uk&#x2F;Conditions&#x2F;Diabetes-type2&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;Introduction.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhs.uk&#x2F;Conditions&#x2F;Diabetes-type2&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;Introducti...</a><p>When I feel like reaching for the sweets or over-sugared drinks I stop to wonder if it&#x27;s worth losing my legs or my eyesight.