Watch What You Drink!

Written and Read by Dr. Russ L'HommeDieu
Did you know that one of the worst things you can do when your'e trying to lose weight is drink calories. 

A tremendous source of excess Calories come from high Calorie drinks.  Considering that most of those Calories have no nutritional value, your body can easily do without them. To make matters worse, research shows that drinking extra calories also makes you eat more. In a study at Penn State University, people who ate a lunch with a 150 Calorie beverage ate more food than the group that enjoyed a Calorie-free beverage. By the way, the BEST Calorie free beverage is water. 

            If you are in the habit of drinking high calorie drinks, you are probably racking up an astonishing amount of Calories. Although most drinks are labeled, the labels can be misleading. Each bottle of soda that you drink has 100 calories per serving but wait-- there are generally 2.5 servings in every bottle. So an ordinary bottle of soda  250 calories! What about the average “large” soft drink from a fast food chain? A large fountain drink from McDonalds packs 310 Calories. All of those Calories are from pure, refined, SUGAR!!! How much sugar? 86 grams of sugar per serving-- 86 grams of sugar-- 86 grams! Are you kidding me? No, I checked it three times. 86 grams of sugar is the same as eating 18 teaspoons of sugar!! Do you want fries with that? (570 Calories for a large) Can I Supersize that for you?  Almost 900 Calories from just the drink and the fries and I have not even discussed the “entrée” yet.

            OK. Soda is bad. Got it! What if you are not a soda drinker? Only “healthy” drinks for you, right? Good work. You should be safe. Try again. A glass of 100% pure, not from concentrate, orange juice has Calories too.  If you were to fill that large McDonalds soda cup with OJ, it would have 409 Calories and 76grams of sugar. Even if you don’t drink that much OJ all at once, it is important to understand OJ is not that much different than soda. It has almost as much sugar and it has MORE Calories! Think about it. How many oranges do you have to squeeze to get a glass of juice? Actually, drinking a 12oz glass of orange juice is just like eating about 6 full-sized oranges. Worse yet, when you squeeze juice, you throw away all the fiber nature packaged the fruit with!

            Are sports drinks OK? Don’t kid yourself. Calories are Calories and sugar is sugar. When in doubt, read the label. When you read the label, start with the serving size and then go to the Calories. If you are going to drink the whole bottle, you need to multiply the Calories by the serving size. It is just that simple.

 According to this Gatorade nutritional information label, this product has 50 Calories. If you look closer, you will notice that there are 4 servings in the container. That means that there are 200 Calories in this bottle. With 14 grams of sugar per serving, that means all of those calories are from sugar. In fact, if you calculate the calories from the sugar information on the label (14g of sugar at 4 Calories per gram times 4 servings) you actually get 224 Calories. I am not sure how those calories fell off the label but I can assure you they will not disappear from you so easily. 

             The sad fact is that most people just don’t think about the calories they drink. According to Dr. Brian Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating:” “In every beverage study, we conducted; people underestimate the calories they drink -- usually by about 30%.  It doesn't matter whether its soft drinks, milk, juice, or wine, although we found vending machines pose the biggest danger.” To help people see the caloric truth about drinks, Dr. Wansink developed the "10 -- 20 " rule of thumb.  As part of this rule, he divides drinks into two broad categories: “Thin Drinks” and “Thick Drinks.” He describes thin drinks as things like soft drinks, punch, juice, and milk while a thick drink is more like shakes and smoothies. As a general rule, he says figure thin drinks at about 10 calories per ounce and thick drinks are about 20 calories per ounce.  This rule could be a great running start but, it can also be another way of justifying your way into way too many calories. For instance, the “Love It” sized fruit “Strawberry Bananza” smoothie at Cold Stone Creamery is low fat, made of fruit and is packin’ 600 Calories.  At about 18 ounces, that is just about 20 Calories per ounce. However, the same sized drink made with regular strawberry ice cream would have a full 1200 calories!! In this case, if you used the 10-20 rule; you would be telling yourself a 600 Calorie deception. Think about this, if you were to indulge one 600 calorie deception like this a day, you will gain 63 pounds a year just from the calories you denied drinking! So be Alert! 
This caution does not stop with soda, juice and ice cream shakes. It also includes what you put into your coffee. Think about the calories that coffee creamer and sugar adds to your coffee. When you have an idea of how many Calories you think that will add to your daily intake, add 30%. Remember, it only takes 3500 excess Calories to gain a pound. When you think about the amount of calories that are in sugar and creamer, you could easily lose 5 to 10 pounds this year by drinking black coffee or unsweetened tea instead.