As a resident stereotype-affirming Brit, I like tea. I normally have about 15 mugs a day. (Imagine a mug of tea to be roughly equivalent in size to a tall Starbucks coffee.)
What I want to know is, if I keep drinking vast quantities of tea, will I get any fatter? I normally have my tea quite strong with a regular amount of semi-skimmed milk and one and a quarter sugars. I used to have it with an aspartame based sweetner, but I have recently become Suspicious of it, and I don’t really like the Saccharin ones that much. So we’re back to sugar.
Given 15 mugs of tea a day with milk and one and a quarter sugars, what should I be looking to do to balance this aspect of my diet? What about with sweetner? (Aspartame has a much lower calorie count than sugar, but it might cause me to drop dead. Is it worth it, I wonder?)
Thanks for your help, I’m off to make #8 of the day.
Tea has no calories (or such a small amount it’s practically zero), so it can’t make you fat itself.
1 1/4 sugars is I’ll assume is a teaspoon and a quarter. Sugar is usually listed as have 14-16 calories per teaspoon, so it’s about 20 calories per cup.
A cup of whole milk has 150 calories; assuming you’ve put in 1/8th cup and that’s about 19.
So each cup of tea would be under 40 calories. Fifteen cups a day and that’s a total of 600 calories. Not really all that much, overall.
Sugar only has 15 calories per teaspoon. Assuming that’s your standard, you’re getting 281.25 calories of sugar in a day. That’s less than in two 12 ounce (355 ml) cans of Coke. Not a huge amount.
You don’t say how much milk you use or what percent fat “semi-skimmed” is. Let’s assume you use a total of a cup (8 ounces or 237 ml). A cup of 2% fat milk has 5 grams of fat and 150 calories; a cup of 1% milk has 2.6 grams of fat and 105 calories. Again, these amounts are not large in the context of the average adult male’s 2500 calories a day.
If you really want to cut down on sugar, my suggestion is to try to find sucralose, which is marketed in the U.S. under the trade name of Splenda. I passionately hate all other artificial sweeteners, but I’ve switched to Splenda for my coffee.
600 calories is essentially 2 candybars a day and all other things being equal adding 600 non-necessary calories per day to your diet is the equivalent of eating 4,200 extra calories per week or approximatley 18,000 extra calories per month. You can easily get quite fat over time on 600 extra calories per day.
If you’re worried about sugar intake - and let’s face it, no doctor would recommend 15-20 spoons a day - there are other sweeteners than the ones you’ve tried.
I’ve been doing the Atkins diet (low carb) using a natural sweetener called Stevia, which comes from a plant. The taste is OK, takes a little getting used to.
What I haven’t tried (as I’m trying to stay all-natural) but what many fellow Atkins dieters are RAVING about is something called “Splenda”. This is an artificial sweetener that derives from sugar, and apparently tastes very close.
The Atkins diet recommends against aspartame, for health reasons. Another website I went to said that you get the best taste results with a combination of sweeteners, so you might find that mixing saccharin and splenda works for you, if you’re worried about your calorie intake.
Drinking as much as you claim to drink would significantly increase your metabolic rate (not to mention your blood pressure) if it were indeed caffeinated. The average caffeine content of black tea is about 40mg per 8 oz serving, not that much really, until you double it to a 16 oz mug, which means 80mg per serving, and multiply it by 15 mugs, which would net you 1200 mgs of caffeine, a day.
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about the extra fat from the sugar, I’d be more concerned about the damage I was doing to my heart, and potentially liver, with that high of an intake of caffeine.
If you drink decaf, use splenda.
Try and stay away from milk in tea though. Nasty kidney stones from the ionic bonding process.
Now, when you drink your tea, do you also get out the standard British “tin of biscuits”? Hmm? From simple observation, tea seems to be the healthiest part of a typical British diet (Mr. Brain’s infamous faggots, aside. Natch).
Cat Fight: lol the British diet isn’t that bad. scrutinises the average American one We do eat a lot of biscuits though, it must be said. I’m personally addicted to kit-kats. I don’t care how morally corrupt Nestlé is, Kit-Kats trump ethics.
buttonjockey: Eep. I’ve been drinking this much tea for the last 7 years, just about, and about half this amount since I was 6. I have been to the doctor five times with random non-serious heart problems, and I can never sleep properly. Maybe I’ve found the reason. laughs sheepishly And this is before the coffee I drink. Ho-hum. But I’m still a teenager. I have time to detox!
Everyone else: Thanks for the input. 600 calories a day. Well, I don’t drink soft-drinks or eat chocolate bars that regularly (kit-kats of course don’t count, because they taste so nice), so I suppose it’s not that bad! Most interesting, too. I will also look for this Splenda of which so many speak.
But if I’m switching to decaf, I have over 3000 bags of tea in my cupboard that need using. Anyone want some? There are eighteen types, and none of it is from a supermarket.
What is the evidence that caffeine damages the liver? I remember looking for something to back up this assertion, but could not find a thing about it. If you know something factual to back it up, please divulge. Otherwise, I will regard this as unsubtantiated.
In fact the only bad thing about tea I saw there was about herbal tea - it said that drinking herbal tea may damage the enamel on teeth and that tea drinkers were at a slightly higher risk of incontinence - but not as much so as 20 a day smokers (there’s something they should put on the anti-smoking ads ;)) or the obese, or those who have caesareans as opposed to natural childbirth.
I think it is possible that caffine can stimulate an increase in insulin response. That being said, I do believe a high level of insulin can cause fat storage. Drinking tea before or during a meal may make your body automatically store as much as possible as fat rather than using it in other areas of the body- i.e break the protein down into glucose and store it.
In that way it could. otherwise what everybody else said.
Idiot journalists. :rolleyes: Really, one would would have thought one could expect better reporting from the BBC. How pathetic. “Herbal tea ‘damages teeth’.” Which bloody herbs? They didn’t specify. Do you blighters have any idea how many different kinds of herbs are used to make herbal tea? How many different species? The benighted reporter didn’t even bother to find out which herb in particular was allegedly to blame. Instead, they publish this alarmist story that blanket implies any kind of herb is bad for teeth. This is bloody irresponsible reporting.
It’s for this reason that caffeine is banned on the Atkins Diet. From the forums I visit, it seems that many people break this rule, then find that their weight-loss “stalls”. But it appears that the effect of caffeine - on various things - varies wildly from person to person. Eg on me it appears to have zero stimulative effect, but a big diuretic one.
Imagine the marketing possibilities, though! “Free sample pack of Depends with proof of purchase!”
Or in Canada, the warning label on the pack of cigarettes: “Warning! Smoking will make you pee your pants!”
On a more serious note, for Zenpea, if you’re worried about gaining weight, why don’t you try to slowly decrease the amount of sugar you put in your tea? I used to take two teaspoons of sugar with my tea. I cut it back slowly to one teaspoon. Then half a teaspoon. Now I don’t use any at all and I find my tea sweet enough. (I use milk as well, and I went from 2% to skim milk over a period of time.)