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Comment by gboudrias | Hacker News Reader

As long as it also applies to juice. It's usually the same amount of "bad sugar" but since it says "orange" on the bottle, people think it's healthy...

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Or even some "coffee" drinks.

Black coffee? Pretty healthy, just water and caffeine. 0 calories. 0g sugar. 0g sodium.

A Starbucks "White Chocolate Mocha"? 530 calories, 320mg of sodium, 69g of sugar per 20 oz "Venti" serving. That's twice as many calories as a 20 oz Coke, with twice as much sodium, and higher sugar levels.

Nobody is defending soda here. Just pointing out, this good idea needs to be applied consistently or people will switch from "unhealthy" soda to "healthy" coffee drinks or "healthy" fruit juices both of which can have scary-high sugar too.

I like the "color code" system they have in Europe[0]. You buy a soda and it has a red warning on the sugar/salt levels.

[0] https://www.nutrition.org.uk/images/cache/537bf3c6516df64581...

1 cup of black coffee has <5 cals according to the internet, not 0. it's basically 0 but i think it's important to be precise when it comes to diet.

5 cals can really be rounded down to zero. It's important to also focus on the big picture.

No, actually if one is making a decision whether or not to drink black coffee while fasting, it is interesting and actionable data.

I do in fact drink black coffee in a fasted state and if it had 5 calories (which I don't believe it does) I would choose not to ...

5 calories will not take your body out of its fasting state... unless you're being religious about it

This makes me think of premature optimization. There is such thing as energy homeostasis in biology. Most things about diet are going to be imprecise, and the target system is adapted to imprecision.

Most sources list it as 0 or 1 calories. Additionally considering that caffeine may increase your RMR ("Resting Metabolic Rate") by 3% or more[0][1], if you want to be "precise" it may be more accurate to say that black coffee contains negative calories.

So how precise do you need it to be? 0, 1, <5, or -1, -5 calories? Or is this just pedantic nitpicking?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7486839

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2912010

>it may be more accurate to say that black coffee contains negative calories.

Calorie has a pretty specific definition. What makes you feel like the scientific definition doesn't work for you?

Just imagine the calories in a Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino Extra Hot With Foam Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended, One Sweet'N Low and One Nutrasweet, and Ice.

This is the longest possible order you could order at Starbucks. Once you have ordered this, you cannot order anything larger.

I don’t think you can extra-hot and ice.

However, you could probably add “half syrup” modifiers or something. “In my personal reusable insulated starbucks mug” has a lot of characters in it.

Also I don’t see the words nitro or blonde in there.

Remember the poor person at the counter can accept more modification requests than the app.

Keep working on it. :-)

It's an internet classic...

https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Double_Ristretto_Venti_Half-...

The "soda tax" in Philly doesn't apply to Starbucks, there was some suggestion that it may of been purposefully excluded due to lobbying efforts though I haven't looked too deeply.

It looks like Seattle has a similar exemption: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fancy-lat...

Exemptions like these make me pause, I can see the point of such a law (though I'm libertarian and not in favor) but when exemptions like that are made I find it hard to take seriously. If the state was concerned with sweetened beverages they would apply the same measures to all of them. Taxing or applying warning labels to soda alone strikes me as a classist move as if the lower classes are too dumb to read the nutrition information.

The situation is more nuanced and complicated with fruit juice . Too much is probably bad for you, but moderate amounts have been shown to have health benefits. In poorer areas many can afford juice but not whole fruit.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

same as milk. milk (even the "fatfree" one) has a ton of sugar. should we also place a warning on milk?

we should also start labeling fruits. because sugar.

if you ask me this is a bit ridiculous. If you don't get that soda/soft-drinks aren't exactly good for you a warning is not going to help you.

> As long as it also applies to juice.

Agreed! Also would like to see full health warnings for each of the non-sugar sweeteners, colors, preservatives, etc.; anything with studies showing it's bad.

Flavored (and sweetened) milk drinks have already been given a special exemption from the rules, with no particular reason stated.

I'd like to be able to debate the fundamental merits of labelling and public-interest laws like this. But in practice I just end up opposing them because they're reliably full of stupid loopholes and special-interest favoritism.

This is a situation where we can rank preferences:

1. Worst case scenario - no sugary drinks are labeled 2. Partial progress - Some sugary drinks are labeled (Soda) 3. Full progress - All sugary drinks are labeled.

I wouldn't try to slow the momentum by fighting 2 if 3 is the ultimate goal.

I have no objection to labeling juice based on sugar content. But you can't really state that a particular juice is "healthy" or "unhealthy". It depends on the quantity.

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