Four drinks secretly making you fat

Have you ever wondered why despite your efforts to steer clear of greasy food you are still putting on weight? The problem could be what you are sipping-not what you are muching.

Weight gain is often associated with food, and as a result people tend to pay little attention to what they drink. Here are four drinks that could be causing you to put on the extra inches:

Tea and Coffee

What is a Kenyan breakfast without a steaming hot cup of tea? Don’t forget the customary 10 and 4 o’clock rations while you are in the office. Perhaps you might also take one in the evening as you unwind from a long and hard day at work.

Tea leaves are loaded with powerful anti-oxidants that are good for your body; however, we often add heaped teaspoons of sugar to each cup sneaking in extra calories with each drink. While a teaspoon or two of sugar a day is not fattening in itself, multiply this by the four or five cups and you have got 8 to 10 tea spoons of sugar a day.

Coffee drinkers are in the same boat as well, especially those who buy fancy brewed drinks. Coffee shops often use thick milk cream to make their drinks frothy. In essence, you are not only consuming extra sugar-you are also having more fat too.

Alcohol

When the phrase alcohol induced weight gain is mentioned, what comes to mind? You probably pictured the rotund belly of a man who’s had more than his fair share of beer.

Most people assume that if they avoid the brown bottle, they are safe.  This is, however, far from the truth as most forms of alcohol contain calories. For example: a glass of wine has approximately the same amount of calories as a slice of cake. Cocktails tend to pack more added sugars as they often include syrups, sugar and fizzy drinks.

Soda

Nothing quite quenches your thirst like an ice-cold fizzy drink on a hot day, and nothing quite packs on the calories either. An average 500ml of soda has about 200 calories accounts for about 10% of the amount of calories an average adult should be consuming.

To put it further into perspective, that 500ml of soda is equivalent to the number of calories that you would get from a plate of Ugali and sukuma wiki.

What makes excessive soda consumption worse is that one is taking in empty calories. Unlike Ugali and sukuma wiki which will come loaded with nutrients, soda only has sugar and water.

Fruit juices

When people get to hear about the nutritional facts of fizzy drinks, they often replace soda with fruit juice thinking that it is the healthier option. While these juices have the added benefit of vitamins and minerals, they often come with loads of added sugar to improve the taste.

Worse still, some manufactured juices only have about 10% fruit juice while the rest of the drink is made up of water and sugar. In a bid to pass these drinks off as healthy choices, the containers are packaged with images of fruit while the information about the actual juice content is listed in tiny font.