The cost of crappy coffee

The Montreal Gazette's article today on Tim Hortons upping (Americanizing?) its coffee sizes noted that this would likely result in consumers consuming larger volumes of coffee with a clear conscience. It also seems like a to try to increase revenue, with given that the new large has the old extra-large's price tag if I understand things correctly.

What I also wonder about is the impact of simply drinking crappy coffee, and the need to disguise the taste with cream and sugar. A Tim Hortons Large (soon to be medium) double-double, is as I understand it perhaps the most common coffee order there. It also comes with 230 calories versus virtually nothing for the equivalent volume of black coffee (it may have up to about 5 calories by some estimates).

With 3500 calories being the estimated amount to gain a pound of wait, drinking a Tim Hortons double-double 5 days a week instead of black coffee comes up as about 17 pounds of additional weight per year. Depending on how many of these calories are offset elsewhere, it seems that better coffee could go a long way towards solving obesity problems.