I’m not a big fan of Starbucks – the coffee is both overpriced and bad – but every now and then I find myself adjacent to one and in need of a snack. Rather than get a 400 or 500 calorie “creme” Frappucino® (no coffee in those), I tend to indulge myself with a slice of iced lemon pound cake (which, oddly, isn’t listed on the web site’s nutritional information but I doubt that it has fewer than the 330 calories (110 from fat) that a slice of marble pound cake has). This week I noticed something interesting.
The made from 100% unbleached paper with 20% post-consumer recycled content bag that my slice of pound cake was delivered in also included verbiage about how Starbucks had “removed the artificial trans fats, artificial flavors, artificial dyes, and high-fructose corn syrup” from their food products. My first thought was: does that mean all that crap has been in their food all along? My second thought was: what’s the profit motive?
See, Starbucks is a company that doesn’t do anything unless it’s going to turn them a bigger profit. So how has Howard Schultz figured out a way to make taking artificial crap out of his company’s cakes and cookies a financial win because he’s sure not doing it out of the goodness of his heart.
High-fructose corn syrup gets a lot of the blame for America’s obesity epidemic. Sometime in the late 1970s soft drink and other processed food producers figured out they could save a few pennies per unit if they switched from actual sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. And they were right. The other thing that the switch, which they have not made in Europe where Coke and Pepsi are both still made with sugar, allowed particularly soft drink producers to do was move more product.
See, high-fructose corn syrup does this sneaky thing in your body: it doesn’t digest chemically like the sugar your mouth tastes it as. Your body when it processes this additive treats it like undigestible vegetable matter. So while high-fructose corn syrup has the same number of calories as sugar, your brain doesn’t get the message that you’ve consumed those calories and the chemical trigger that says “full now, stop eating” doesn’t fire. This allows you to drink more soda, and consume way more calories than your body needs, while still not feeling satisfied, hence the term “empty calories.”
Having just spent two weeks in Europe eating every single meal out at a restaurant I can tell you that while this additive – which is in everything from soda to bread (as a preservative) – does play a big role in our every widening ass problem, mostly it’s the size of the portions we get, and make for ourselves, that are the biggest problem.
Italy is the land of meals in courses: antipasto, primo piatto, secondo piatto, contorni, dolce and café. That’s potentially five courses at one dinner sitting, and not as uncommon as you would think but it’s the size that really matters. Antipasto is maybe 3/4 of an ounce of prosciutto crudo with a slice of cantaloupe, or a medium sized tomato with the same amount of fresh mozzarella. Your first plate is pasta or risotto, probably no more than 1/3 of a cup, lightly sauced. Your second plate is meat or fish, generally not more than two to three ounces. Contorni is some kind of vegetable, green beans or verdura alla griglia (grilled eggplant, zucchini, carrots, and some times arugula, all sliced as thin as paper and no more than a two to three ounces total). And your dolce is small as is your café.
In an American restaurant, you couldn’t eat like this for less than 5,000 or 6,000 calories. Hell, Livestrong.com says there are 2,310 calories in the Bloomin Onion at Outback Steakhouse. That’s your daily calorie allowance and then some just for your appetizer (aka: antipasto) course. Even some of the items on Ruby Tuesday’s “smart choices” menu have upwards of 450 calories per serving (pdf). So, does it really matter what’s in our food if we’re eating double or even triple our recommended daily allowance of calories in one meal? I’m thinking not.
And that leads me back to my original question about Starbucks and ingredients: real ingredients, sugar, fresh tomatoes, real berries, all of these things cost more money to procure and use. The spoilage rate is higher which means you’re not only spending more on the ingredients you are, in the long run, getting less out of them. The only way I can see that Starbucks is going to make money off this move is to make the portion sizes smaller. And really, that’s a good thing.
Nice article. I’ve started paying attention to calories counts recently as a thumbnail guide, not to be obsessive. I did a little comparing, and here’s what I found:
So instead of a 16-oz Frappucino, you could have 6 oz of tangerine juice, a sandwich made from 2 slices of wheat bread and 1 slice of cheddar cheese, 6 oz of nonfat yogurt, 1 cup of blueberries, a little honey….and still only be at 400 calories total. Wow.