At 18.5 calories a day, non-dairy creamer has become the biggest calorie add-in in the average American adult's coffee, ahead of sugar at 16 and dairy milk at 11. In 2003 it supplied just 7.71.
The figures come from researchers at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Lead author Yongyi Pan, senior author Fang Fang Zhang and colleagues analysed about 30,000 US adults across eight cycles of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2003 to 2018. The amount of coffee people drank barely moved, at about 13 ounces a day, yet the calories it carried rose from 43 to 60. Sugar and milk use stayed largely flat over the same years.
Pan pointed to the saturated fat many non-dairy creamers contain, a calorie-dense ingredient. The study tracked what people add to their cups, not what it does to their weight or health, and its data end in 2018.
