Coffee nutrition

ruthielil

Can one of Cronometer's RDs authenticate for me that coffee, brewed from grounds, really does supply all the nutrients that Cronometer's food database says it does? Please check the "Coffee, Prepared from Grounds -- small or tall 12 oz" NI.

Hilary

It sure does! This listing comes from the NCCDB! In general, the NCC conducts repeated analysis on a food throughout the year to get an average value for each nutrient, or finds these values in peer-reviewed sources.

You can learn more about our data sources here: https://cronometer.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018239472-Data-Sources

Susan_RD_101

@ruthielil

It seems surprising, but remember that the coffee bean is the seed found inside a fruit and most fruit seeds provide important nutrients for the plant.

Kind regards,

ruthielil

Thank you to both of you, Hilary and Susan. It is surprising! Especially considering that I read somewhere that when coffee was first introduced to England, some noble person (likely one who had interest in tea plantations somewhere) supposedly said with great disdain that "coffee serves neither debauchery or nourishment." I shall keep drinking my coffee knowing that it's nourishing.

Shimmy

I'm surprised that coffee shows 2.8 grams of fiber in a 20 ounce serving! Seems to me you would have to eat the coffee grounds???

omegaterus

@Shimmy: there is such a thing as soluble fibre, which obviously means it can get dissolved in water when brewing.

DaveB

Shimmy I agree this is misleading inaccurate information. The database being used as the source is questionable in my opinion.

Karen_Cronometer

This is one of our frequently asked questions! We were surprised too, so we looked for another source of information and found a study that analyzed the fibre content in brewed coffee. They found that that brewed coffee contained 0.47−0.75 g/100 mL of soluble dietary fiber. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jf062839p

The carbs might come from the finely ground pieces of the coffee beans that get through the filter because all the carbs listed come from dietary fibre.

Since this is a very low amount of carbohydrates, US nutrition labeling regulations would allow manufacturers to round this down to 0 grams of carbs. This may be why many sources report 0 carbs for ground coffee.