Diet Blog has an interesting post "Do Americans Have a Drinking Problem?" on how the Average American has nearly doubled the amount of calories he/she intakes through beverages alone over the past 37 years. I was curious to see just how many calories one could consume just through drinks alone living in our Starbucks, Jamba Juice, Vitamin Water, soda society.
I was shocked to find that you could innocently consume 700 calories alone and be someone who is generally conscious about what they consume. In this first example, I used Odwalla OJ, milk, a Fuze drink, a basic Starbucks coffee, and a glass of Merlot for dinner. There is no soda, no fat/sugar loaded Frappucinos, or even any fat/sugar loaded alcoholic drinks like a Pina Colada.
Most of the drinks on this list could be considered pretty innocent, and drinks most health-conscious folks would imbibe. In your head, you could easily rationalize that if you had to have a Starbucks drink that a Soy Gingerbread Latte minus whip is not going to break your caloric bank like a Strawberries & Creme Frappucino would. As well at dinner, one glass of Merlot is better than having a Mai Tai. One at a time, each choice seems like a fairly innocent one, but add them up over the day, and WHAMO! 700 calories and you haven't even eaten any food! Shockingly as well, you are consuming 112g of sugar. That's pure fuel for muffin top creation.
I was going to add a Jamba Juice drink into this mix because most of us consider Jamba drinks "healthy", but holey moley, those drinks are loaded with calories and sugar, and the lower cal versions use artificial sweeteners which I think everyone should avoid. So, to keep the heart palpitations to a minimum, I left Jamba Juice out.
To relieve the shocking horror, I created another table that lists lower calorie and lower sugar alternatives to the above list.
In the alternatives group, I also added the bonus of using drinks that did not use any artificial sweeteners like aspartame or splenda as I personally do not drink anything with artificial sweeteners in it. My Diet Coke addiction is finally dead and I have noticed a big difference in how I feel and how weight drops from my body much easier. However, as an FYI, crystalline fructose which Glaceau uses as their primary sweetener in Vitamin Water and Fruit Water is derived from cornstarch not fruit which some argue is just another "healthy" marketing disguise for high fructose corn syrup. Okay, for me, one battle at a time.
What a BIG difference, huh! By switching to alternatives like these, we've cut our daily caloric intake from drinks by 66% and our sugar intake by 57%, and were still able to have some sugar. I have a sweet inclination, so I cannot eliminate sugar entirely but I have switched to using the more natural Sugar in the Raw which are those brown packets of sugar you see at Starbucks instead of white processed sugar or stufff like Splenda.
For your own education, write down what you typically drink in a day, and then look up the calories, fat, sugar, and protein amounts. If you do your drink list in Excel, you can see in milliseconds, how much of your daily caloric intake is just from your drinks.
