Coffee & Espresso

This is the third and final post in our series, Coffee Health and Nutrition. Our first post, “Coffee Nutrition and Health: Black Coffee” covered, you guessed it, the nutrition of black coffee. Our second post, “Coffee Nutrition and Health: Milk Options & Nutrition,” discussed how the milk in your coffee can make or break your dietary goals. This final post will cover how you can sweeten and flavor your coffee in new ways to meet with what we’ve seen to be common nutrition goals.

Sugar, syrups, sauces. This is where we can find ourselves saying we’re drinking coffee when we’re basically sipping a hot, king-sized candy bar.  We’re not going to mention any names, but some chains serve syruped-up “coffee drinks” that have 60 — even 70 — grams of sugar. That’s actually worse than a candy bar. So how can we sweeten/flavor coffee drinks without turning them into the nutritional equivalent of a Snickers?

Let’s start with some useful information:

A teaspoon of sugar has about 16 Calories and 4 grams of sugar.

The all natural syrups (vanilla, hazelnut etc.) we use at La Vita Dolce contain about 25 calories and 6 grams of sugar per pump. For a 12 oz. flavored drink, we typically use 1 pump of syrup (that this shouldn’t necessarily be expected at other cafes — some chains use 3 to 6 pumps per drink!).

Adding a flavored syrup to your drink (again, this is at La Vita Dolce where we use syrup in relatively small doses) is equivalent to adding about 1.5 teaspoon sugar.

So a 12 oz. vanilla latte at La Vita Dolce doesn’t have nearly the amount of sugar as a king-sized candy bar. But a large mocha with caramel and whip can be well into candy bar range.

Sugar & Spice: Making Them Nice(r)

Regardless of where you are on the black brew to candy bar coffee nutrition spectrum, if you’re adding any kind of sugary syrup to your drink, the suggestions below might help you slide toward the healthier end while still pleasing your tastebuds.

For the extreme sugar lovers, we suggest gradually cutting back on the syrups and sauces added to your drink. Move from 3 pumps of chocolate plus 3 pumps of caramel to 2 pumps of each. And then maybe cut out the caramel, and so on.  Over time, you may begin to enjoy the flavor of the coffee itself as your tastebuds adjust.

There’s also the option of using artificial sweeteners. I’m not going to get into the health implications of these as research results are varied. But they’re certainly an option and certain syrups come in sugar-free varieties.

My top suggestion, though, is to try to stop using syrups and sauces in your coffee. Syrups and sauces are usually the culprit when a coffee drink becomes seriously unhealthy. I know that syrups are convenient as they’re easy to use — pump and done (or pump pump pump pump and done, as the case may be.). They allow for fewer steps in the drink-making process as they flavor and sweeten all in one.

My beef with syrups is, well, exactly that: they inextricably link flavor and sugar in preset proportions. To get more of a certain flavor, you also have to add more sugar. Syrups take away some of our control. I’m not into that.

But, fret not, there are ways to add flavor and sugar independent of one another, and thereby limit or eliminate the added sugar.

At La Vita Dolce, we try to use ingredients that are the natural source of a flavor. Think using ground cinnamon instead of cinnamon syrup. Even 100% juice is better than a fruit flavored syrup.  When you add flavor through unsweetened sources, you can still choose to add sugar to sweeten your drink, but you can control the amount you’re adding. The resulting nutrition of your drink can improve substantially.

See the example below, which compares the nutrition of a traditional 12 oz. mocha to La Vita Dolce’s 12 oz. Cacao Almond Milk Mocha. By using different milks and sources of flavor and sweetener, we get very different nutritional outcomes.

	Traditional Mocha	Cacao Almond Milk Mocha
Calories	233	99
Fat	8.5g	3g
Sat. Fat	5g	0.5g
Carbs	30g	15.5g
Sugar	29g	12g
Fiber	1.5g	1.5g
Protein	9g	1g
Cholesterol	35mg	0mg
Calcium	30%	46%
Vit A	6%	10%
Vit D	25%	25%

The differences in the two drinks are:

• Both have 2 shots of espresso (no difference in coffee content)
• The traditional mocha is made with chocolate sauce while the Cacao Almond Milk Mocha is made with raw cacao and sugar.
• The traditional mocha is made with whole cow’s milk and the Cacao Almond Milk Mocha is made with soy milk. Just kidding. Yes, it’s made with unsweetened vanilla almond milk.

Both are chocolatey, delicious indulgences. But the Cacao Almond Milk Mocha has less than half the fat, calories, and sugar and almost no saturated fat. You can feel good about yourself and enjoy a decadent treat all at the same time.

You also have complete control over how much sugar is in your Cacao Almond Milk Mocha — the sugar isn’t already added to what’s giving the drink its chocolate flavor.

The nutrition information above results from our standard amounts of cacao and sugar. However, some customers ask us to use less sugar, which we can easily do without using less cacao (we have at least one customer who just gets cacao and no sugar). This makes it easy to get a mocha that’s less sweet, but still chocolatey. Or you can use a different sweetener with your cacao, such as honey or Stevia. And if you want it sweeter, you can even add more sugar while still being better off than you’d be with the traditional mocha.

It’s pretty exciting, at least to me, to have more control over both the specific elements of flavor added to your drink, and how good you feel about yourself while you’re drinking it.  It makes the whole experience even more of a treat.

(I’d also like to point out that aside from having less sugar than processed chocolate, raw cacao has a lot more antioxidants and potential health benefits. So you’re not just reducing the bad stuff, you’re getting some really good stuff. Read about it in this entire post on our Cacao Almond Milk Mocha.)

Other examples of going to the source for flavor are using vanilla extract instead of vanilla syrup or using ground nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice and ginger instead of Pumpkin Spice syrup (we use these ground spices in our Spiced Pumpkin Latte). One of our specialty drinks has a splash of 100% apple juice. Our Thai Iced Latte is made with ground cardamom, sweetened condensed milk, and almond milk; for certain customers we reduce the sugar while maintaining the spiced flavor by using less sweetened condensed milk.

You get the idea. You can have a lot more healthy (and I’d say tasty) fun with flavors when you stop relying on syrups.

Final Comments

A few final comments, as this is the final post in our Coffee Concoctions For Your Dietary Goals series.

Brew Method

In the second post of this series, I briefly mentioned that there are a number of factors that can affect the taste of black coffee. These include bean origin, how the beans were processed, how they were roasted, and how they are brewed. Most of us aren’t growing, processing, or roasting at home, but we do brew at home.

Given the nature of this post I want to mention cold brewing and pour over brewing. If you like your coffee with milk and sugar but want to move toward drinking it black, these methods are good options.

Cold brewing typically produces coffee that tastes “sweeter.” La Vita Dolce’s cold-brewed nitrogen-infused Dolce Nitro naturally tastes sweeter and creamier than our drip brew; as a result I often tell customers who typically add sugar and milk to try it black first. (The creaminess is from the nitrogen we infuse into the cold brew).

Pour over coffee, compared to drip brewed or French press brewed coffee, is probably more palatable to those used to sweetened drinks, too. The pour over method brings out fruity and floral notes in the coffee and will produce brew that has less body than other methods.

Talk to Your Barista

If you come to La Vita Dolce, talk to us about your taste preferences and dietary goals! Our baristas love making customized drinks for customers, and know a whole slew of ways to adjust a drink to meet your needs.

We can switch up milks, change the proportion of milk to coffee, substitute spices and other flavored ingredients for syrups, replace sugar with other sweeteners, cut the caramel added in half and so on. For example, after talking with customers about what they like and their health goals, I’ve wound up making our Cacao Almond Milk Mocha many different ways. I’ve replaced half the sugar in the drink with Splenda, used skim instead of almond milk, cut out all sugar, increased the amount of espresso, and so on.

It makes our day when we know that your drink is a treat for you in every way. So go ahead, make our day.

This is the second post in our Coffee Nutrition and Health series. Our first post covered general health implications and nutrition of black coffee and you can read it here. 

In our first post of the series Coffee Nutrition and Health we learned that coffee has no sugar, no fat, and zero to five calories. We also saw that coffee consumption is correlated with a host of health benefits and, to top it all off, that the latest US dietary guidelines give two thumbs up to three to five cups of coffee per day.

So we all cheered and ordered our fifth cup of brew for the day.

And chances are that fifth cup  — or whatever number it is — probably isn’t black coffee.

All of the delightful information in our first post was about black coffee. And while we love black coffee, which can have an endless range of flavors depending on a number of factors (e.g. bean origin, type of processing and roasting, brew method), most Americans don’t drink their coffee solo. They typically mix coffee with other ingredients that change the nutrition of what they’re consuming. So now we’re going to our address these other ingredients — the ones that can be the key players when it comes to meeting your dietary goals.

This post, the second in the series, will focus on milk nutrition, and our third post will cover sweetening and/or flavoring coffee.

Milking Yo’ Milk

Most espresso drinks we sell at La Vita Dolce consist of coffee and milk (e.g. lattes, cappuccinos). The milk in your drink impacts taste/texture/body of the drink as well as its nutritional content. Switching the milk you use is often the easiest way to cut fat, calories, and sugar — or boost nutrients you may want, such as protein and Calcium.

The chart below shows key nutrition information for the most commonly used dairy and non-dairy milks.

Milk Nutrition (by Serving Size)

	Whole	Skim	Almond*	Soy*	Oat*	Coconut*	Half & Half (2 TBL)
Calories	150	90	30	110	180	45	40
Fat	8g	0g	2.5g	4.5g	8g	4.5g	3g
Sat. Fat	5g	0g	0g	0.5g	1g	4g	2g
Carbs	12g	13g	1g	9g	23g	2g	1g
Sugar	11g	12g	0g	6g	3g	1g	1g
Fiber	0g	0g	1g	2g	1g	1g	0g
Protein	8g	8g	1g	8g	4g	0g	1g
Cholesterol	35mg	5mg	0mg	0mg	0mg	0mg	15mg
Potassium	380mg	410mg	160mg	380mg	260mg	65mg	NA
Sodium	120mg	130mg	150mg	95mg	160mg	15mg	20mg
Calcium	30%	30%	45%	45%	6%	10%	4%
Vit A	6%	10%	10%	10%	NA	10%	2%
Vit D	25%	25%	25%	30%	NA	30%	NA

*Almond Milk shown is Almond Breeze Unsweetened Vanilla. Soy Milk is Silk Original. Oat Milk is Pacific Barista Series. Coconut is So Delicious Original.

You’re probably not going to memorize that chart. So below, we’ve provided an easily referenced list showing which milks are good options for a variety of dietary goals.

Low Calorie
Almond Milk
Coconut Milk

Low Sugar
Almond Milk
Coconut Milk

Low Fat
Skim Milk
Almond Milk

High Calcium / Vit A / Vit D
Whole Milk
Skim Milk
Almond Milk
Soy Milk

High Protein
Skim Milk
Whole Milk
Soy Milk

In a Nutshell: A Note on Almond Milk & Coconut Milk

While my aim is for you to find what’s best for you, I want to put in my two cents about milk — two cents that I would spend on almond milk.

You can see that almond milk appears more frequently as a “good dietary option” than any other milk in the above chart.  Almond milk has just as much (or more) Calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin D as cow’s milk. It also has one fifth the calories of whole milk (and one third the calories of skim milk), it’s relatively low in fat, and it’s the only milk listed above that has NO sugar. This all adds up — or in the case of fat and sugar, prevents it from adding up — to almond milk being my go-to when prioritizing my health.

(If consuming high protein and/or low sodium are top goals for you, then almond milk may not be the best choice.)

While coconut milk has recently become more popular in coffee drinks, it’s the only milk listed above that La Vita Dolce does not carry. It’s not that we have an issue with coconut milk — we just have limited refrigerated storage space.

Given our limitations, we stock three non-dairy milks: almond, soy, and oat milk. Almond and soy tend to be better options when meeting customers’ nutritional preferences and we find oat milk to be the most neutral of the non-dairy milks. Coconut milk has less Calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin D than both almond milk and soy milk.  It has more calories, fat, saturated fat, and sugar than almond milk and less protein and fiber than soy milk.  Coconut milk is a great option for those whose top priority is cutting Sodium, but this isn’t a concern for most of our customers. So it’s the one that isn’t on in our limited refrigerated space.

Taste Test It Out

This series isn’t just about nutrition — it’s also about enjoyment. We want everyone to enjoy every coffee they drink. This means, if you’re drinking a latte, cappuccino, or other drink with milk, you should like the milk that’s in it. If you haven’t already, try different types of milk. You may even find that your preference varies with what you’re drinking. For example, one of our baristas who normally drinks cow’s milk prefers almond milk in her Dirty Spiced Apple Chai Latte. Also note that when milks are properly steamed, they change in texture and taste (e.g. they become sweeter) so the impact a given milk has on your drink will vary depending on how it’s prepared. So my suggestion is to test, test, test until you find a nutritional fit that also passes the taste test.

Our next post in the Coffee Nutrition and Health series is “Sweetening and Flavoring Solutions” and will discuss ways to have fun flavoring and/or sweetening your drink while not turning it into the nutritional equivalent of a sippable Snickers.