Cappuccino vs. Iced Tea

Regular readers will recall my fondness for Honest Tea, a variety of bottled iced tea brewed in the U.S. and until last year available locally here in Charlottetown. One of the things I like about Honest Tea is that it’s much less sweeter that commonly available iced teas from Lipton and Nestle.

A 16 oz. bottle of their Moroccan Mint Green variety, for example, has 10g of sugar, compared to 36g of sugar in the same sized bottled of Lipton Original Iced Tea - Sweetened.

When Shoppers Drug Mart, my local source for Honest Tea, dropped the brand and replaced it with the Canadian Urban Zen brand, I made the mistake of not looking at the nutrition label: it was in the “health” section of the store, after all, and replaced a brand with less sugar. So it must be “healthy,” right?

Recently, however, I began to notice that after downing a 16 oz. bottle of the Urban Zen Green Tea with Ginger, I felt a little like I’d just eaten half a chocolate cake. A glance at the label showed me why: every bottle contains 41 grams of sugar: that’s as much sugar, it says here, as a can of Pepsi, and equates to “seven teaspoons or 13 lumps of sugar.”

No wonder I felt like I’d just eaten half a chocolate cake: I had.

Contrast this to the one packet (equals 1 teaspoon, equals 4 grams) of sugar I put in my morning cappuccino, and is it any wonder that the cappuccino lifestyle makes me feel much less frenetic.