How Unhealthy Is Your Starbucks Drink?
By: Yasmine Hejazi
Tags: Nutrition, Coffee, Data Science, Starbucks, Data

The distributions show that Starbucks drinks are slightly left-skewed for calories, sugar, and caffeine. This makes sense as Starbucks does offer a number of zero-calorie and zero-sugar drinks, mostly falling in the tea category. It also offers a good amount of non-coffee and decaf drinks.

The above scatterplot and linear regression show the relationship between calories and sugar in all Starbucks drinks. Caffeine is denoted by color, where darker color means more caffeine. As expected, there is a clear and consistent positive relationship between calories and sugar. Caffeine looks to have no clear relationship with the other two variables, with the exception where drinks with very little to no calories and sugar contain a high amount of caffeine. This makes sense — coffee roasts, which do not have any milk or sugar added, have a very high amount of caffeine relative to other drinks.

Let’s look into drink categories to see if we can uncover deeper patterns in these three nutrition types.

Analyzing drink categories

We can use the categorical linear regressions above to compare calories to sugar in Starbucks drinks. For each and every drink category, we can see that as the number of calories increase, sugar increases. Using color to show the relationships by drink category, we can see that data points in the Frappuccino category tend to be placed higher in calories and sugar relative to the other categories. Data points in the Hot Tea category tend to be in the lower ranges of calories and sugar. Finally, the Hot Coffee and Cold Coffee categories have a very wide distribution in this plot. This shows that the drink’s nutrition in these categories are not dependent on the category, but instead on other variables that make up the drink.

Caffeine is most apparent in Hot Coffee and Cold Coffee, with most points falling at or above 150mg. Many drinks in other categories contain caffeine but fall at or below the lower end of the Coffee categories.

Caffeine for a grande drink can go up to 360mg. It is generally recommended to not go over 400mg a day.

Starbucks in your daily diet

Looking at g/mg values for all of the nutrition types doesn’t tell us much because we cannot compare the amounts of each nutrition type with different scales. To standardize this, I wanted to know how the nutrition values for each type compare to the daily suggested intake.

As Specified by the FDA Based on a 2,000 Calorie Intake for Adults and Children 4 or More Years of Age:

Calories: 2000

Fat: 78g

Cholesterol: 300mg

Sodium: 2300mg

Carbohydrates: 275g

Sugar: ?? → “There is no Daily Value for total sugars because no recommendation has been made for the total amount to eat in a day.” — (FDA)

Protein: 50g

Source: https://www.fda.gov/media/135301/download (updated March 2020)

For healthy adults, it is generally recommended to not go over 400mg a day, an amount not associated with negative affects — (FDA)

Caffeine: 400mg

After this transformation, I wanted to see how nutrition types compare to each other now. What is the average daily intake percentage of each nutrition type for Starbucks drink items?

Average of daily percentage broken down by nutrition type and category

A high level of caffeine intake is apparent in this heatmap for the categories Cold Coffee and Hot Coffee. This further supports the observations that caffeine is most apparent in the variant Nitro Cold Brew drinks (Cold Coffee) and the variant “roast” drinks (Hot Coffee).

On a positive note, it is very good to see little darkness in the other nutrition types. With the other nutrition types, we need to worry about how they add up when we start concerning our daily meal intake as well. Having a lighter value lets us save the bulk of our calorie intake for the meals that fuel us. On the other hand, we don’t have to worry about caffeine intake for the rest of the day… unless you are someone who has multiple cups of coffee a day.

And the most unhealthy drinks are…