Reader Request: DD Iced Coffee With Cream

One of my readers who is new to WW was struggling to figure out how many PTS to count for a Dunkin Donuts medium iced coffee with cream. I used the DD Web site to help her come up with an estimate.

The Web site has the nutrition information for a medium iced coffee with skim milk and Splenda, which is 1 PT.  That’s close, but this young woman orders her iced coffee with cream not milk (she’s working her way down to skim, but wants to know how to track the original). 

The site doesn’t contain any information for a medium iced coffee with cream and Splenda, so we had to do a little approximating. The closest thing I found was a small iced coffee with cream.  There’s no accounting for the Splenda/Equal, but that’s 0 PTS so we can ignore that in the calculation.  The other issue is that this is a small, not a medium. More drink = more calories = more PTS.

A small is 16 oz while a medium is 24 oz, 1.5 times bigger. If we assume the proportion of cream and coffee stays the same in the medium we can multiply the calories and fat by 1.5 to get an approximate breakdown for the medium. That translates to 105 calories and 9 g of fat, which is 3 PTS. 

In this case it would also work multiplying the PTS by 1.5 (2 * 1.5 = 3) but I prefer to multiply the base nutrition information when scaling portions up. Why? because it takes the 4 g fiber limit into account. It’s not an issue here because there’s no fiber in coffee, but it’s a better habit to get into. The PTS may come out a bit higher, but the goal isn’t to count things for as little as possible. If you overestimate a bit you’ll likely just lose weight faster.

Hope that helps all my DD readers.  Living around Boston I know there are alot of you out there!!