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This Is How Many Extra Calories You Consume from Taking Your Tea with Sugar

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign have worked out the caloric implications of adding a sugar cube to your brew.
Photo via Flickr user aesop

How do you take yours? Milk? One lump or two? OK, more like three or four.

As if being judged by the sugar police for making your morning tea or coffee a little sweeter wasn't bad enough, it seems researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign have found another dampener for your coffee break. The tea party poopers have worked out exactly how many extra calories milk and sugar add to your brew.

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Sorry, coffee addicts. You come off worse.

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The study, which was published last week in the Public Health journal, found that people who add sugar, cream, and other sweeteners to coffee consume an average of 69 more calories per day than those who drink theirs black. Similarly, tea-drinkers who take cream and sweeteners consume 43 more calories on average per day than people who drink the hot beverage without adding anything.

The University of Illinois researchers came to these conclusions after analysing 12 years' worth of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is used to assess the state of public health in the US. The data from the survey included information on 19,400 adults who said they had drunk hot beverages in the 24 hours prior to questioning.

Despite the extra calories in milky and sugary drinks, as well as numerous warnings that the white stuff isn't doing our bodies a lot of good, it seems many of us are reluctant to change our tea- and coffee-making ways.

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Co-author of the University of Illinois study and community health professor Ruopeng An explained in a press statement: "[The] add-in items are often dense in energy and fat but low in nutritional value. Our findings indicate that a lot of coffee and tea drinkers regularly use caloric add-ins to improve the flavour of their beverages, but possibly without fully realising or taking into consideration its caloric and nutritional implications."

But life's too short for Splenda, eh?