A Tufts analysis of 30,000 adults across 16 years of national survey data found coffee intake flat at about 13 ounces a day while calories from it climbed, driven mainly by non-dairy creamer.

Coffee itself is close to calorie-free. What people put in it is not. A new analysis from Tufts University finds that Americans have not changed how much coffee they drink over the past two decades, but have steadily increased what they add to it, and non-dairy creamer has quietly become the biggest single source of the calories involved.

The study, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, drew on two 24-hour dietary recalls from 30,000 adults aged 20 and older, across eight cycles of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, from 2003 to 2018.

“Coffee consumption has been associated with several health benefits,” said Fang Fang Zhang, the Neely Family Professor at Tufts’ Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and the study’s senior author. “However, coffee is often accompanied by the addition of sugar and cream, which can contribute to an increased consumption of calories from added sugar and saturated fat.”

Flat consumption, rising calories

Total coffee consumption held steady at roughly 13 ounces a day throughout the period, a little over a mug and a half. The calories that came with it rose from 43 per day in the earliest cycles to 60 per day by 2018.

Seventeen calories a day sounds trivial. Over a year, it is roughly 6,200 calories, and the figure is an average across all adults, including people who drink no coffee at all, which means the increase among regular drinkers is larger.

The pattern behind that rise is specific. Dairy milk and sugar, the traditional additions, did not change significantly between 2003 and 2018. By 2018, adults were adding an average of 21.4 grams of dairy milk and 4.4 grams of sugar to their coffee each day, roughly what they had been adding fifteen years earlier.

Non-dairy additions, by contrast, nearly tripled, rising from a mean of 3.65 grams a day to 10.5 grams. Non-dairy creamer went from 3.37 grams to 8 grams, and non-dairy milk from 0.27 grams to 2.45 grams. Other additions rose by half a gram on average.

Creamer overtakes sugar

Because non-dairy creamers pack a lot of energy into a small volume, that modest-sounding shift in grams translated into a change in which ingredient contributes most.

“We found that non-dairy creamer being added to coffee has now passed both sugar and dairy for its contribution to the total energy consumed from coffee,” said Yongyi Pan, a PhD candidate at the Friedman School and the study’s lead author.

By 2018, non-dairy creamer accounted for 18.5 calories a day, ahead of sugar at 16 and dairy milk at 11. In 2003, creamer had contributed 7.71 calories a day, less than half as much.

“Non-dairy creamers can be high in saturated fat, which is calorie dense,” Pan said. “This could explain the increased calories that non-dairy creamer is contributing.”

Many powdered and liquid coffee creamers are built on hydrogenated or fractionated vegetable oils, often coconut or palm kernel oil, which are high in saturated fat. Dietary guidelines in the United States recommend limiting saturated fat to less than 10 per cent of daily calories, and small amounts spread through the day from products people may not think of as fatty can add up.

“Even though it has been on the market since the 1950s, non-dairy creamer has increased in popularity in recent years as consumers seek plant-based or dairy alternatives,” Pan said.

Who drinks more

The analysis also looked at which groups drank the most coffee, and two patterns stood out: adults who slept less and adults who worked longer hours drank more of it.

Neither finding is surprising on its face, since caffeine is the most widely used stimulant in the world and people reach for it when they are tired. It does suggest, though, that the people consuming the most coffee, and therefore the most of whatever they add to it, are those under the most time pressure.

Coffee consumption was similar between people with high and low overall diet quality, which means heavy coffee drinking is not simply a marker of an otherwise poor diet.

Small amounts, many cups

Nutrition researchers pay attention to additions like these precisely because they are easy to overlook. A splash of creamer is not a meal, and few people record it when thinking about what they ate. But coffee is a daily habit for a majority of American adults, often several times a day, and anything consumed that reliably adds up.

The research on coffee itself has been broadly favourable. Observational studies have linked moderate consumption to lower rates of type 2 diabetes, liver disease and some cardiovascular outcomes, though the evidence comes largely from population studies rather than trials. What such studies rarely capture in detail is what people put in the cup, which is the gap this analysis sets out to fill.

The same logic has driven attention to sweetened beverages, where the calories come without the satiety that solid food provides. Additions to coffee occupy a similar niche: consumed in small amounts, many times, without much notice.

“The more we know about what people are consuming, the better we can understand the link between nutrition and overall health,” Zhang said.

The study has the limitation common to dietary research of this kind. It relies on people reporting what they consumed over the previous 24 hours, which is subject to measurement error, including day-to-day variation in what any individual happens to eat and drink. Two recalls per person capture a snapshot rather than a long-term average.

NHANES remains the standard source for tracking what Americans eat, because it uses a nationally representative sample and consistent methods across cycles, which makes comparisons over time meaningful even where absolute values carry uncertainty.

Bingjie Zhou, a former PhD student at the Friedman School, was a co-author.

The practical upshot of the findings is narrow but clear. What has changed over the past two decades is not how much coffee Americans drink, but what goes in alongside it.

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Notes

1. Pan, Y., Zhou, B., Zhang, F. F. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2026.156908.
2. Tufts University. “Americans are putting more additives—and calories—in their coffee.” EurekAlert!, 20 October 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1148541.

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