Math Saves, Don't drink Starbucks!

I was trying to get something caffeinated to push me through a long workday and got the best of what was available. Starbucks Vanilla thingum, presumably lowish in calorie with 290.

I stopped drinking it in horror the moment I noticed how much sugar was in the bottle. In 13.7 ounce of drink, there are 46 grams of sugar. That's 11.5 teaspoons of sugar, in a drink that weighs 13.7 ounces. [ETA: A mathematically-inclined person on Twitter pointed out my conversion error. I'm going to adjust, now. Basically, I should go straight from grams to ounces, and not grams to tablespoons to ounces. Maths is VERY HARD when you're high on sugar. It is literally like cocaine at high levels, with similar effects on the brain.] If these were circus peanuts, that would be 11.5 of them. Right, so, that means the drink is 1.6226 ounces of sugar. Do you have a kitchen scale handy? Go measure that out. It's actually quite a lot for a 13.7 ounce beverage. Now, the percentage of this "drink" that is sugar is... 1.62/13.7=11.8% sugar. THAT'S A VERY HUGE AMOUNT FOR ONE DRINK.

And the front presumes to brag about how low the calories are.

Starbucks, I call shenanigans. You are supposed to be ethical. You push yourself as the just and ethical alternative. You brag about one thing... And of course there would be so few calories in the drink if it had absolutely no meaningful quantity of milk in it... You do realize, Starbucks, that obesity is a crisis in this country and sugar turns into calories in the system almost instantly without any nutritive elements to slow down the insulin rush, right?

We should all be talking about this. We should all be writing about this. These companies are literally selling us our own early grave and refuse to be honest with their products. 46 grams of sugar should be the most important thing to know about a 13.7 ounce "beverage" and it is hidden in the fine print and masked as grams instead of ounces or tablespoons. The WHO recommends no more than 25 grams of sugar per day per an adult, less for children. 46 grams is almost double that, all by itself. If you ate nothing but lettuce for two days, you'd still likely be over your daily limit of sugar per day with just one of these horrible drinks.

.

Don't even drink this shitty diabetes juice. It has 2 days of sugar in a single glass. It is trying to kill you. Starbucks, per its products, wants you to think their drink is relatively low-calorie. They want you, then, to pick their healthier-looking option against the soda and energy drinks on offer. But, with two days worth of sugar hidden behind a misleading label, they also seem to want you to get diabetes and die young in terrible pain from chromic, preventable diseases.

They used to call Type II Diabetes "Adult-Onset Diabetes." It used to be something kids just didn't get. Now it's an epidemic. Starbucks, if you're seeing this, well, this aspect of your products are to blame. Do you have kids? Would you want them to drink this, with all that sugar in it? Would you want your spouse to drink it, knowing how much sugar is in it?