Carbs/sugars in coffee?

Zigster70
Zigster70 Posts: 2
in Food and Nutrition
I've been using My Fitness Pal for a couple of months now - fantastic way to help me lose weight. I'm down from 85 kg to 79 kg and close to my initial goal of 75 kg (which would mean a BMI of less than 25). I'll review then whether to push it further to 70kg.

I do, however, have a question on coffee. I drink quite a lot of coffee - several espressos a day. But coffee (black no sugar) has virtually no calories so I didn't think that was a problem.

I've been keeping an eye on my calories but not so much the other stats around nutrition. I've just now been reviewing my food diary and all areas are good except that I seem to be consistently way in excess of the recommended amount for sugar. Looking at my food diary, it seems to be the amount of coffee I drink.

Each "Coffee (Espresso)" serving of 20ml is shown as having 7g of sugars! That puts me on more than 100g of sugars today alone. (Don't worry, I'm not actually having 16 espressos - it's just that, with virtually no calories, I've been slightly careless about the recording and I've been putting mugs of black filter coffee down as a quadruple espresso - my actual coffee intake is a slightly more reasonable 4 mugs of filter per day).

Surely 7g of sugars in an espresso is nonsense? Is it just a mistake in the food item?

Replies

  • Chief_Rocka
    Chief_Rocka Posts: 4,710 Member
    What you're logging is probably the nutrition facts of an espresso with sugar. If yours is black with no sugar, it's virtually zero calories; I wouldn't bother logging it.

    Also, I wouldn't bother worrying about the MFP sugar setting, a few pieces of fruit will easily put you over. Make calories your primary focus.
  • melsinct
    melsinct Posts: 3,512 Member
    What you're logging is probably the nutrition facts of an espresso with sugar. If yours is black with no sugar, it's virtually zero calories; I wouldn't bother logging it.

    Also, I wouldn't bother worrying about the MFP sugar setting, a few pieces of fruit will easily put you over. Make calories your primary focus.

    Agreed. If you aren't adding anything to it, I wouldn't even bother logging the one calorie.

    This is MFP's database listing for espresso (the one WITHOUT the asterisk, meaning it was not entered by a user. User entered data is notoriously faulty):

    Calories 1
    Sodium 4 mg
    Total Fat 0 g
    Monounsaturated 0 g
    Polyunsaturated 0 g
    Potassium 35 mg
    Saturated 0 g
    Total Carbs 0 g
    Dietary Fiber 0 g
    Sugars 0 g
    Trans 0 g
    Protein 0 g
    Cholesterol 0 mg
  • Zigster70
    Zigster70 Posts: 2
    Thanks, both of you. That's what I thought - coffee has (effectively) no calories so I was only logging it to keep a record of the amount as I'm conscious that I probably drink rather too much.

    I'm not sure whether or not the "Coffee (Espresso)" item I've been using is user defined or not - there's no asterix. Either way, I've started using a different coffee item - again, just to try and keep track of how much coffee I'm drinking - which has more realistic nutritional values.

    I'm still over on sugars - but that's largely due to a couple of pieces of fruit a day so I'm not so concerned.

    Cheers

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