It sounds like an either/or type of question, but it's not intended as such. When I ask whether you drink flavored coffees or used flavored coffee creamers, what I'm really asking is if you do, which do you prefer? Personally, I prefer drinking coffee without any creamer whatsoever, but that's just me.

Flavored Coffee

While you can find major brands of coffee who sell flavored coffee as well as the unflavored kind, it usually makes more sense to buy flavored coffee that's a specialty of a particular company.

Now, someone needs to throw me a bone here. Back in the early 1980s, I used to drink an instant flavored coffee (so to speak) called Cafe Viennese, but it wasn't produced by General Foods. It came in the same kind of tin, but that's the only similarity. For the life of me, I can't remember the brand name and I can't find it by searching on Google. It was really only a flavored coffee in the sense that it had chocolate added to it.

Despite the fact that flavored coffees exist, most people prefer to use non-dairy flavored coffee creamers.

Flavored Coffee Creamers

Do dairy flavored coffee creamers exist? I've seem hundreds of non-dairy flavored coffee creamers, but I don't think I've seen a flavored coffee creamer with real milk or cream.

Some of the liquid coffee creamers come in specialty containers and some of them come in what looks like milk cartons. These types of non-dairy coffee creamers are probably the easiest to use. There are flavored coffee creamers in powdered form, like Coffee-mate's Hazelnut coffee creamer, but I don't think they're nearly as popular. There's something about pouring liquid into liquid that people seem to prefer.

A Word of Caution

And that word is "trans fat" (that's actually two words but who cares?). One of the things you'll see on some containers of flavored coffee creamers, as well as the unflavored kind, is the notation of "no trans fats" or "0 percent trans fat" or something to that effect.

Don't believe everything you see on a label. The US FDA allows labels to carry a "no trans fat" banner if the trans fat percentage is below a certain threshold. If it's a powdered non-dairy creamer, it's guaranteed to have some percentage of trans fat simply because it's made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. There's absolutely no way around that chemical process.

If I'm going to put any kind of coffee creamer in my coffee, I'm going to put a dairy product. At least I know where it came from and I know it has mostly natural ingredients. Of course, that isn't always the case and labels should always be studied before a product is purchased.

Flavored Coffee Creamer Taste

Every once in a while (like once every couple of years), I like to drink flavored coffee. Most of the time, it's just by adding chocolate. I do like the taste of Irish Cream, Hazelnut and Cinnamon, and these three flavors seem to be available everywhere in the US, including convenience stores like Circle K.

Most of the time, I drink my coffee black with two teaspoons of sugar. I can drink it without sugar if I make it weak, but I like my coffee strong. I once spent a month on a US Navy ship where we ran out of everything but coffee. No sugar, no soda and no milk. The only beverages to choose from were unsweetened black coffee and water. That's where I learned to drink weak coffee without sugar or coffee creamer.

My parents always drank plain, black coffee when I was growing up. No creamer and no sugar. In fact all of their siblings drank it the same way. The only thing I can figure out is that they were born and raised before and during the Great Depression of the 1930s and got used to drinking it that way.

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When non-dairy creamers were introduced either in the late 1950s or early 1960s, people didn't know that one of the ingredients isn't good for you at all. The use of non-dairy creamers peaked in the 1980s, but there are people who have always used one form of milk or another instead of buying into the non-dairy creamer routine.

The bad ingredient I'm talking about is partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (or fat).

Dairy Creamers

I was born in 1960 and grew up watching the older folks drink coffee with a dairy creamer of one kind or another. I don't even remember a non-dairy creamer being used before we lived in Hawaii in the mid-1970s.

Evaporated milk from a can is what I remember the most. It's not really cream. It's just milk with a lot of the water removed and thus it still has to be refrigerated after opening. Sugar is added as a sweetener when evaporated milk is used. Condensed milk, also called "sweetened condensed milk", already has sugar added to it. It's basically evaporated milk plus sugar and it has to be refrigerated after opening as well.

Some people think that regular whole milk is thick enough to serve the purpose. I know that the UHT milk works well because that's what I use on rare occasions. Since I learned of the trans-fat issue surrounding partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, I've been drinking coffee black with a little added sugar.

Non-Dairy Creamers

One of the first makers of non-dairy coffee creamers was the Nestlé Corporation, with Coffee-Mate in 1961. A whole bunch of other companies jumped on the bandwagon and I can't even begin to name names.

I suppose people who are lactose-intolerant are left with a choice of either black coffee or coffee with a non-dairy creamer. Fortunately, Nestlé has come out recently with non-dairy creamers that are lower in fat and some that contain absolutely no partially hydrogenated vegetable oil at all.

The trick is to read the label. Some brands of non-dairy creamer will say "no trans-fat" when in reality they have just little enough to legally say none. The Nestlé Corporation has no reason to skew this information since they're marketing health-conscious products as much as possible.

Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils and Trans-Fats

I'm no chemist and I only know what I've learned through various sources. The process of hydrogenating vegetable oil produces trans-fats. Trans-fats have been linked to heart disease as well as the increased size of people's midsections (the big, fat belly syndrome).

Non-dairy creamers are used in tea as well as coffee, so the benefits of drinking tea are outweighed by the trans-fat that non-dairy creamers introduce. You need to do your research and read the labels when you decide to buy a non-dairy creamer product. It's your health you should be worried about, not about whether it tastes better with a dairy creamer or not.

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