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Doctors Agree: Why People Who Drink This In The Morning Struggle To Lose Weight
Are you a coffee lover who is working to lose weight? If you’re noticing that your hard work and efforts are being stalled, the answer may lie in how you take your coffee, health experts explain. For many of us, plain black coffee really isn’t our thing, and we might stir in some creamer or sugar to help sweeten it.
Sipping on heavily sweetened, sugary and high-calorie ingredients every morning could contribute to weight gain, and we reached out to doctors, dietitians and nutritionists to learn more about this. Read on for tips, suggestions and insights from Dr. Daniel Boyer, MD, health and nutrition expert at Farr Institute, Dana Ellis Hunnes, PhD, MPH, RD, senior dietitian at UCLA medical center, Trista Best, MPH, RD, LD, registered dietitian at Balance One Supplements, and Lisa Richards, registered nutritionist and creator of The Candida Diet.
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How Heavily Sweetened Coffee Can Stall Weight Loss
Many coffee consumers have a specific way they like their coffee and don’t often veer from that, Best says. “Unfortunately, for those wanting to lose weight, these coffee habits might be stalling their efforts,” he adds. Full-fat dairy creamer and refined sugar are the two coffee habits that are detrimental to weight loss, “especially for those who consume more than 1 cup a day,” she continues. These two ingredients used to lighten and sweeten coffee are “high in calories, fat, carbohydrates and are quite inflammatory.” Not only will the calories add to weight issues, she warns, but the “inflammation they cause or exacerbate can make weight loss more difficult as well.”
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Boyer concurs, and also warns that “processed coffee drinks that may hinder weight loss are creamers and those mixed with artificial sweeteners.” Caffeine with added sweeteners contains a “significant amount of artificial sugars,” he points out, and may “lead to extra calories when taken in excess.” Generally, he notes that coffee creamers also contain calories and saturated fats (2 grams of saturated fat in 1 tablespoon). “Saturated fats are linked to an increased body weight, according to research by the US National Library of medicine, particularly when mixed with added sugars,” he says.
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Hunnes agrees, stressing that many bottled, processed coffee drinks have “added sugars, sweeteners, and fats in them.” (She says to think the creams, syrups, flavors, and colorings such as caramel coloring in a bottled frappuccino, for example). “When you go to your favorite coffee shop, many of the syrups they are added contain a lot of sugar, and that can add a lot of extra calories,” he goes on, saying that you might not even realize how many extra calories a coffee drink can have “A black coffee on its own is zero calories,” Hunnes notes, but the “syrups and creams that are used, and any whipped toppings can make this zero-calorie beverage now closer to 300 or 400 calories,” she adds. “That’s practically a meal,” she says. (Yikes!)
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The Best Ways To Prepare Coffee For Weight Loss
Boyer advises that “taking black coffee—which doesn’t contain any calories—in moderation or with unsweetened plant-based sweeteners like almonds or quick oats” may be the best alternative if you are under a weight management plan. If you do want to sweeten your drink, Hunnes recommends using “non-dairy, unsweetened beverages such as soy or oat milk that are creamy but not sugary and then adding extracts like vanilla or almond and spices like cinnamon and clove.” All of these, she says, “pack a warmth and sweetness without much sugar or calories.” If you do decide to try your coffee “completely black,” Hunnes suggests a “light roast, and cold can help too.”
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Best concludes that rather than sweetening your coffee with full-fat dairy creamers and refined sugar that it’s essential to “opt for natural sweeteners and/or plant-based creamers.” Some plant-based creamers are still high in calories, fat and sugar, she demands, so it is “important to still pay attention to the nutrition label.” By opting for a plant-based creamer, you are removing dairy, which she says can lead to bloating and inflammation for many of us when consumed every morning. “Consider using honey or cinnamon to flavor your coffee rather than refined sugars,” Best recommends, similarly to Hunnes’ note. “These two ingredients are natural, anti-inflammatory, and cinnamon can help boost metabolism and stabilize blood sugar,” she says. “All of which,” Best adds, can improve “weight loss efforts and reduce bloating.” Noted!
New Orleans’s 2022 Eater Awards Winners for Best New Restaurant, Bar, and More
Today, Eater New Orleans announces its winners of the 2022 Eater Awards, celebrating the restaurants that have most impacted New Orleans’s dining scene this year (as well as in Eater’s other cities).
This year’s Eater Awards highlight five standouts that made a mark on New Orleans cuisine in late 2021 and throughout 2022: places that established Caribbean comfort food as an integral part of the city’s cuisine, took vegetables to new heights, and put forth unexpected, genre- expanding renditions of Indian street food, among others. Some of these winners began their journeys in the city’s dining scene as pop-ups; their new restaurants offer fresh confidence in the survival and growth of small, resourceful independent food businesses in New Orleans. Others serve to carry on the best of the city’s traditions, like a neighborhood gathering spot with a convivial but eccentric vibe and a fine dining den that demands celebration.
With that, please join us in celebrating the winners for Restaurant of the Year, Reinvention of the Year, Bar of the Year, Pop-Up-Turned-Restaurant of the Year, and Fine Dining Restaurant of the Year.
Restaurant of the Year
Queen Trini Lisa
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At a serene corner shop painted with familiar banana leaves in Mid City, Chef Lisa Nelson brings Trinbagonian soul food to what she, and others, call the Northernmost Caribbean city. It may be her first restaurant, but Nelson has been known to New Orleans for years for serving specialties from her native village of Hardbargain, Trinidad at food festivals and markets, as well as through her pop-up and chef collaborations. Nelson’s jerk and curry chicken, coco bread fried fish sandwich, and Caribbean-style spinach are standouts, becoming staples for many New Orleanians since Queen Trini Lisa opened in January. But the unquestionable star of the show is Nelson’s doubles, fried flatbreads spiced with turmeric topped with a curried chickpea filling (it’s vegan), which can be enjoyed for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a second dinner.
Reinvention of the Year
Bar Brine
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Walk into Bar Brine and feel instantly invigorated by its subtle but warm multi-colored lighting elements, its high-ceilinged, intimate dining room, and a welcoming, vibrant bar — and then prepare to be six colored of the food and drinks. Bar Brine is the nighttime version of Sneaky Pickle, a longtime St. Claude Avenue favorite for vegetarian and vegan-friendly, picnic-style dishes. It was relocated in fall 2021 to a corner Bywater space that had long sat empty and added Bar Brine — a more upscale dinnertime restaurant that offers a notably different vibe from its daytime counterpart. The menu is as invigorating as the space, the beauty in its seeming simplicity — dishes of Hakurei turnips, spaghetti squash, or eggplant; fresh pasta like gnocchi with walnuts and blue cheese, squid ink with crab and daikon, or rice cakes paired with smoked squash and mapo tofu; and a few entrées, featuring products like tilefish, king trumpet mushrooms, or confit goose. A modern wine list of natural and orange varieties, savory and herb cocktails, a rotating frozen drink option that can change the common perceptions of frozen drinks, and some of the best non-alcoholic cocktails around have made it one of the most consistently hot destinations in New Orleans this past year.
Bar of the Year
Velveteen Lounge
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When the Bayou Road neighborhood bar Pirogues closed early on in the pandemic, it was the kind of loss that stirred up a sense of doom. But the new incarnation of the simple corner space, Velveteen Lounge and Restaurant, invoked the reverse — a sense of hope for new, sustainable opportunities in New Orleans’ restaurant landscape that also honors tradition and legacy. The 100 percent worker-owned Velveteen Lounge opened in May 2022, with an eclectic, vintage feel and walls in soothing colors displaying works by local artists — all available for purchase — and a unique bar program. Velveteen has a small menu of straightforward cocktails, but can do just about anything — depending on the drink, however, it might be made with a small spirit brand customers have never seen before. Beers all come in a can or bottle only, and wine options are unexpected for a neighborhood dive — small producers and natural options line the bar, though everything is reasonably priced, including the food: salads, tacos, quesadillas, empanadas, a burger, and more are all $12 and under. It all goes hand in hand with the name: “Velvet is a luxury material,” co-owner Brendan Gordon says. “Velveteen is a knockoff material. Because everyone should be able to have nice things
How the Dutch took the lead in food tech and sustainability
The tiny country of the Netherlands has become a leader in developing technology for sustainable farming. Not only is it becoming a major exporter of food in Europe, it’s also a model for other nations in how to minimize waste and water use, said Laura Reiley, who reports on the business of food for The Washington Post.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Reiley about Dutch advances in vertical farming and raising crops and livestock with reduced carbon dioxide emissions. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Rysdal: OK, so this is a food story. Yes. But really, it’s a technology story. It’s a crazy technology of food story.
Laura Reiley: Absolutely, kind of a shock-and-awe visual smorgasbord.
Rysdal: Well, tell me how you came upon this story, because we should say up front, you know a little bit about food. I mean, you’ve been a professional chef, you’ve, you know, got awards and all that jazz. And here you’re now reporting on it. What got you into this story?
Reiley: Well, I was riding the coattails of this fabulous Dutch photographer, Kadir van Lohuizen, but he was looking at how this very tiny European country is the second largest exporter of agricultural products by value in the world behind the US So, you know, they ‘re doing an awful lot of raising animal and vegetable production and seed production on very little land.
Rysdal: Yeah, we should be clear here, it’s across the gamut of ag, right? It is livestock, it is ornamental vegetables and seeds, as you say. It’s, I mean, it’s everything that they’re doing. And they’re doing it on, not to be pejorative here, a relative postage-size stamp of land.
Reiley: Yeah, you know, half of the land in the country is devoted to ag. But an interesting thing is about 24,000 acres — so about double the size of Manhattan — is under glass, and it’s greenhouses. I mean, if you’ve ever flown over the northern part of the country, not that far from Amsterdam, it looks like something out of “Blade Runner,” you know, it’s just these, like, incredible vistas of sparkling glass . So a lot of what they’re doing is what we call now indoor vertical — there’s a bunch of different terms for that. A lot of what they’re doing is also developing the technology that can be exported to other places. And what’s great about that is that it can make the farms close to where the people live, and in parts of the world where there isn’t arable land.
Rysdal: Yeah. And big multinationals are going over there to learn how to do it.
Reiley: Absolutely. I mean, I think that there’s an awful lot of interest right now in upping our game in terms of technology, a lot of VC money and food tech right now. But some of what the Netherlands is doing is more kind of old-school, regenerative ag, or, you know, minimizing waste and water use. So it’s very kind of climate friendly, high-tech ag.
Rysdal: Say more about that, right? Because among the other things that they are doing is they’re doing all of this production without increasing natural gas use, without increasing CO2, reducing fertilizer, using all of this stuff that, you know, is going to be key as we try to deal with a warming planet.
Reiley: Sure. So they’re huge producers of onions and tomatoes, and they can produce a pound of tomatoes requiring only half a gallon of water. And the average globally is 28 gallons. So, you’re seeing a real discrepancy —
Rysdal: Say that again, because that’s wild.
Reiley: Yes, so on average over the world is 28 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes. In the Netherlands, it’s a half gallon, so none of that water is wasted. And the irony is that, you know, a generation ago, they had a terrible reputation. They were just these hard bullet balls that no one wanted to eat. And so they’ve really kind of changed their reputation. And not just on the vegetable side, but also on animal ag. So, chickens, beef pigs, they’re huge exporters, now the biggest European exporter, and a lot of those ribs come to kind of middling chain restaurants in the United States. So you’ve probably — I’m not going to name names, but you’ve probably eaten some of them unknownst to you.
Rysdal: Look, I mean, you got to use a whole animal, right? Let me ask you this: You have certainly driven up and down California’s Central Valley, right? And seen all the agriculture there, huh?
Reiley: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Rysdal: All right. So, how long do you think it’s going to be given Big Ag in