If you love adding creamer to your coffee, you are not alone! Lots of people love to add a sweet creaminess to their coffee and one of the best and most convenient ways to do this is by using a coffee creamer. Coffee creamer gives you the perfect ratio of sweetness and creaminess, so there isn’t a need to get out your sugar dish and your cream or milk and hope you put in the perfect amount.
With that being said, most of the coffee creamers on the market are filled with heaps of artificial and unnatural ingredients. With artificial flavors, dyes, corn syrup, GMOs, fillers, and preservatives, coffee creamer can get a bad rap and for good reason. Many coffee creamers have more fake ingredients than real ingredients, which is a serious problem. Take a popular coffee creamer brand Coffee-Mate for instance. The ingredient list on their hazelnut flavor is as follows:
Water, Sugar, Vegetable Oil (High Oleic Soybean and/or High Oleic Canola), and Less than 2% of Micellar Casein (a Milk Derivative), Mono- and Diglycerides, Dipotassium Phosphate, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Cellulose Gel, Cellulose Gum, Carrageenan.
As you can see, there is nothing healthy or natural about the ingredients in this coffee creamer. The creamer is mostly water, hence why water is the first ingredient. GMO sugar is next on the list, which comes with many uncertainties. Vegetable oil is notoriously bad for your body and can cause inflammation in the body, cause gut issues from toxins, and there are no actual vegetables in the oil. Instead, vegetable oil is made from industrial use seeds and legumes that were never meant for human consumption in the first place.
The rest of the ingredients on the list are unsafe and unnatural. There is technically no real milk or cream in this creamer and they instead use a milk derivative. Mono- and Diglycerides are emulsifiers and help oils and water blend together making them a common food additive in liquid products. These are trans fats that are unnatural and can cause diabetes, stroke, and heart disease.
Dipotassium Phosphate is another food additive that comes with a host of problems. A study in 2012 found that this food additive to be hazardous to human health. They found that any food that contains phosphate should be considered dangerous to human health and should be avoided when consuming foods. The accumulation of various phosphates in the body can cause organ calcification in both healthy people and people with renal failure.
Natural and artificial flavors may perhaps be the worst offenders on this list. These ingredients are anything but natural and the flavors used in this creamer are made by scientists in a lab. No real vanilla beans, no actual flavor from a whole hazelnut, nothing that resembles a real food makes the flavor in this coffee creamer. Natural flavors are no better than artificial flavors and are highly processed and may contain harmful chemical additives as well.
Last but not least, the last three ingredients are thickeners that are also harmful for the human body. Cellulose Gel, Cellulose Gum, Carrageenan. As you can see, one of the most popular brands of coffee creamer is filled with chemicals and nothing natural. It harms your body and we honestly don’t think that artificial flavors taste any good either. Fake foods taste fake.
Since there is such an issue with coffee creamers, we have compiled a list of some of the best and most natural coffee creamers you can buy that are healthy and taste great, in our opinion! Let’s take a peek at the options below.
- Organic Valley Half & Half, French Vanilla
- So Delicious Dairy-Free French Vanilla Coconut Milk Creamer
- Coffee-Mate Natural Bliss Toasted Coconut Coffee Creamer
- Original Superfood Creamer
All of these coffee creamers have simple ingredients, are organic or non-GMO, do not use artificial flavors, colors, additives, or preservatives. They are a much healthier version of traditional coffee creamers and you can feel much better about adding a splash of these creamers to your daily cup of coffee!