How Starbucks is Making Heart-Healthy Coffee into A Stealth Dessert

Many of my patients believe that coffee is bad for them. I’m not sure where this belief comes from; perhaps the general belief that anything that they really like and are potentially addicted to cannot be healthy.
It’s not uncommon for a patient to tell me after a heart attack that they have “really cleaned up their act” and have stopped drinking alcohol and cut back on coffee. They seem disappointed when I tell them that moderate alcohol consumption and coffee consumption are heart healthy behaviors.
In contrast to what the public believes, the scientific evidence very consistently suggests that drinking coffee is associated with living longer and having less heart attacks and strokes. Multiple publications in major cardiology journals in the last few  years have confirmed this.
You can read the details here and here. The bottom line is that higher levels of coffee consumption (>1 cup per day in the US and >2 cups per day in Europe) are NOT associated with:

• Hypertension (if you are a habitual consumer)
• Higher total or bad cholesterol  (unless you consume unfiltered coffee like Turkish, Greek or French Press types, which allow a fair amount of the cholesterol-raising diterpenes into the brew)
• Increase in dangerous (atrial fibrillation/ventricular tachycardia) or benign (premature ventricular or supra-ventricular contractions) irregularities in heart rhythm

Higher levels of coffee consumption compared to no or lower levels IS associated with:

• lower risk of Type 2 Diabetes
• lower risk of dying, more specifically lower mortality from cardiovascular disease
• Lower risk of stroke

So, if you like coffee and it makes you feel good, drink it without guilt, there is nothing to suggest it is hurting your cardiovascular health. It’s a real food. These tend to be good for you.

Making Coffee Unhealthy: Dessert as Stealth Food

People have always added things to coffee – cream, half and half, milk, skim milk, sugar, artificial sweeteners. The coffee data doesn’t reveal to us what the consequences of these additions are, but given the consistent positive health associations of coffee, they must have had a minor effect.
However, in the last 20 years, the food industry, led by the behemoth Starbucks (which controls 1/3 of the coffee served in the US and has 11,000 stores and growing) has turned coffee into a stealth dessert. Starbucks offers the consumer (by their own admission) 87,000 different choices of coffee drinks.
A basic coffee house drink is a latte’. This consists of one or more shots of espresso combined with steamed milk (skim, 2% or whole) and topped with foam. According to Starbucks, the 16 ounce, medium (I refuse to use their size terminology), cafe latte’ made with 2% milk, contains 17 grams of sugar and 7 grams of fat, yielding a reasonable 190 calories. Those who drink these should understand that they are consuming a glass of milk, plus coffee. Dairy products have consistently been associated with lower cardiovascular risk. They would arguably be better off consuming a whole milk (11 grams fat, 16 grams sugar, 220 calories) latte’ as I’ve pointed out in previous blogs here and here.
 
 

Most of the latte’s consumed at Starbucks aren’t plain latte’s, however; they are nightmares of added sugar. Let’s take the Cinnamon Dolce Latte’: (A complete nutritional breakdown is available from Starbucks’ website (I do congratulate Starbucks for finally capitulating and presenting nutritional data on their products at stores, allowing the public to draw back the curtain on the Starbucks Oz. Their website provides a cool way to compare your drink with whole/2%/skim/soy milk or with and without whipped cream)) It contains 38 grams of sugar, 6 grams of fat, and 11 grams of protein, yielding 260 calories, 152 of which are coming from sugar. That’s 22 grams more sugar, compared to their unadulterated latte’. (There must be an internet site devoted to promoting the health benefits of cinnamon since I hear about them so often from my patients but this claim is not evidence-based)
 
 

My 17 year old daughter’s drink of choice at Starbucks is the Mocha Frappuccino® Blended Beverage, which, according to Starbucks, is “Coffee with rich mocha-flavored sauce, blended with milk and ice. Topped with sweetened whipped cream.” It contains 60 grams of sugar, 15 grams of fat and has 400 calories.
Such concoctions have no right to consider themselves coffee, they should be labeled as a sugar-laden dessert that happens to have some coffee in it. To give some perspective, the typical 20 ounce soda contains 40 grams of sugar (the equivalent of 10 packs of sugar).  Starbucks has added 44 grams of sugar to coffee and milk in order to draw children, teens and unsuspecting adults to consume more “coffee.”
There is growing evidence that sugar, not fat, is the major toxin in our diet. The misguided concept that cutting fat in the diet and replacing it with anything, including sugar, will reduce cardiovascular disease is gradually being rolled back. Nutritional advocates are now zeroing in on appropriate targets like sugary beverages.
It’s sad that Starbucks, which started out making a good, real product that was actually good for you, has morphed into an international, growth-obsessed, behemoth that is pumping billions of grams of added sugar into our stomachs.
But, as the significant other of the skeptical cardiologist (SOSC) often muses, people are always looking for new ways to con themselves into thinking they are eating/drinking something healthy, when in fact, they are just eating/drinking cleverly disguised desserts. Starbucks has made a huge success for themselves by providing people what they want: a way to kid themselves.