Thirsty Thoughts

I’m sitting here drinking my morning coffee. I’m also sitting here looking at the following diagram. 

The image brings about two separate thoughts.

First Thought:

I am a lover of all coffeehouses. Including the chic, clean Starbucks’ that have capitalized our world. All 5mill of them.

Not to be confused with 5mL-clearly, that’s only 1/6^th the size of one fluid ounce OR 1/183.2^nd the size of the TRENTA!

I just don’t know how coffeehouses became the suburban McDonalds. Only with far less judgment.

Not taking into consideration this new size, a Venti Cinnamon Dolce Crème Frappuccino Blended Beverage (made with whole milk and whipped cream) is 450kcal with 11g of saturated fat. The kind of fat you don’t want to saturate your diet with. Take that down to their smallest 12oz size, still trumping the 8oz (1 cup) portion, and you almost cut calories and saturated fat in half.

Portion recognition is key here.

Second Thought:

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a friend over coffee. Actually he was drinking beer and I was drinking decaf and Baileys while sitting at a bar. My recall of the conversation went as follows (although my recollection is subject to mere decaf):

Me:…well if someone cannot eat orally due to injury, disease, unresponsiveness, or whatnot they are fed through a tube. And there are different types of tubes and formulas depending on where you’re feeding someone in their body.

Friend: So like, you feed into the stomach through a tube?

M: Yea, or like sometimes you feed straight into their vein (TPN) and the food/formula has to be in the most elemental form since you surpass the stomach and intestines which digests food. (ie: amino acids instead of intact protein).

F: So wait, where does it go?

M: In your vein. And then you’ve received nutrition.

F: But like how have you gotten nutrition? How are you full?

M: (This is where my epiphany on how differently we thought about nutrition occurred) Well your cells take in the food and your organs utilize the nutrition. And if you overfeed, your cells store excess fat in adipose tissue making you fatter.

F: (baffled) I thought your stomach got fat because you put food into it and it sat there until you pooped.

The conversation continued but the shock never stopped. For either of us.

Yes, 916mL of fluid is a lot but liquids do not just hang out in a stomach all day. Your stomach moves liquids/food into the small intestines where absorption can occur. And the more liquefied and broken down the components, the faster this process occurs. So sure it is a lot of fluid, certainly 3.81 servings of the recommended 1 cup portion, but it’s not necessarily the problem until you throw refined sugar, saturated fat, and copious amounts of caffeine into that 916mL that creates an absorption worthy problem. 

Not to mention, scarily caffeinated suburbanites running around.