Non-dairy creamer supplied 18.5 kilocalories per day of added coffee calories in 2018, ahead of sugar at 16 kilocalories and dairy milk at 11, in a Tufts University analysis of about 30,000 American adults. The finding closes a 15-year look at how people dress their coffee, and it points to a quiet change in what goes into the cup.
AI, explained every day: The Deep View is the go-to daily newsletter for 600,000+ founders, knowledge workers and professionals who want to stay up to date with artificial intelligence.
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
Total calories from coffee climbed from 43 to 60 per day between 2003 and 2018, a rise of nearly 40%, even though the amount people drank stayed near 13 ounces a day. The extra energy came from what was poured in, not from drinking more coffee.
What the NHANES coffee recalls measured
The work, led by Yongyi Pan, a Ph.D. candidate at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics as “Trends in the Consumption of Coffee and Coffee Additions Among U.S. Adults” for the years 2003 through 2018. Fang Fang Zhang, the Neely Family Professor at the Friedman School, is the senior author, and Bingjie Zhou contributed while a doctoral student there. The Tufts summary distributed through ScienceDaily describes the sample as about 30,000 adults aged 20 and older, drawn from eight consecutive cycles of a national survey.
The survey is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and each participant completed two 24-hour dietary recalls. Pre-mixed coffee drinks and powders forced the team to estimate how much milk, creamer or sugar each product contained, using the USDA Food and Nutrition Database for Dietary Studies for every survey cycle. Those estimates, along with the reliance on memory, are the main sources of measurement error in the work.
How creamer passed sugar and milk
The ranking depends on whether additions are counted by weight or by calories. By weight, dairy milk was still the most common addition in 2018 at 21.4 grams a day, with non-dairy creamer at 8.1 grams and sugar at 4.4 grams. Calories tell a different story because creamer packs more energy per gram. Non-dairy additions overall rose from 3.65 grams a day in 2003 to 10.5 grams in 2018, with creamer going from 3.37 to 8 grams and non-dairy milks from 0.27 to 2.45 grams.
Over the same period, amounts of dairy milk, sugar and sugar substitutes showed no statistically significant change. Creamer’s own contribution rose from 7.71 kilocalories a day in 2003 to 18.5 in 2018. Pan told Newsweek that non-dairy creamer being added to coffee “has now passed both sugar and dairy,” a shift she tied to a product that has been sold since the 1950s but has grown more popular.
Pan offered one possible explanation for the calorie gain: “Non-dairy creamers can be high in saturated fat, which is calorie dense.” That is an interpretation of a trend, not a tested mechanism, and the analysis does not establish why consumers shifted. Earlier Tufts reporting on a 2017 study in Public Health found that sugar contributed the most added calories in NHANES coffee, with coffee drinkers who used add-ins taking in an average of 69 more calories a day than those who drank it black, so the leading ingredient has changed hands in recent years.
Readers should keep the design in mind. The figures are self-reported recalls from two days per person, and daily intake varies, so the data may not capture anyone’s usual habits. The authors took steps to improve the reliability of their estimates, though the public summary does not spell them out, and it does not describe the work as showing that creamer causes weight gain or any disease. The estimates describe adult coffee consumption in the national survey as a whole, so they say little about how any one person should read their own cup.
What the associations do and do not show
The team also looked at who drinks more coffee. Fewer hours of sleep and longer work hours were associated with higher coffee intake, while intake was similar across higher and lower diet-quality groups. These are associations in survey data, and the work does not show that short sleep or long workdays cause people to drink more, or the reverse.
Zhang framed the broader aim as understanding what people actually consume so nutrition guidance can follow it. Rashmi Gajree, a U.K. registered nutritionist who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek that liquid calories may not be very filling, which is one reason a creamer habit can add energy without displacing food. She also said non-dairy creamers are not inherently bad in moderation and that their value depends on the ingredients in a given product.
A rise of 17 calories in the daily coffee total, from 43 to 60, is small for any single day, and the survey does not track weight or health outcomes tied to the extra calories. What the numbers show is a change in the composition of a very common drink: coffee volume stayed flat, sugar and milk held steady, and creamer took over as the largest source of added calories, rising from 7.71 kilocalories in the first survey cycle to 18.5 in the last.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
AI, explained every day: Get The Deep View →
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
More from Morning Overview
