Tuesdays at Starbucks is a ritual for two Bend couples, who stop on their way to a weekly Weight Watchers meeting.

The ladies, Cindy Meyer and Claudia Westman, order 16-ounce pumpkin spice lattes with low-fat milk. Cindy’s husband, Bruce Meyer, has a 20-ounce skinny vanilla latte, and Bob Hill has a 12-ounce salted caramel mocha. The sipping commences once they’ve weighed in at the Masonic Lodge basement, regardless of the results. “We’re here, that’s the thing,” Cindy Meyer said.

Specialty coffee drinks are high in calories and sugar and seasonal offerings are even more of a dieter’s pitfall. A 16-ounce Pumpkin Spice Latte with 2 percent milk has 380 calories.

The weekly treat doesn’t undermine these couples’ diets, they said, because it’s just that — a treat. The rest of the week, they drink plain coffee at home. But most people who stop at Starbucks or a drive-thru coffee stand do it every day, and that habit is a huge contributor to weight gain, Bend dietitian RanDee Anshutz said.

“Some of those drinks at Dutch Bros., they’re more syrup and ice,” Anshutz said. “That is pretty much where I start with most people.”

Dutch Bros. doesn’t hide the facts about its specialty drinks — all the nutrition information is online — but the reality is that many customers want something sweet, said Kaelyn Costa, co-owner of the Central Oregon Dutch Bros. franchise. The Caramelizer (324 calories for 12 ounces) and the Kicker (372 calories for 12 ounces) are listed first on the menu because that’s what most people want, Costa said.

With limited-time pumpkin flavors, the coffee purveyors manage to pack even more calories into a cup. Pumpkin-flavored drinks from Dutch Bros. and Human Bean are similar to Starbucks in calorie and sugar content. One reason the Dutch Bros. pumpkin flavor packs so much punch is that it’s a sauce, which is more like caramel than a flavored syrup, Costa said. One ounce of Dutch Bros. Pumpkin Pie sauce is 110 calories.

There are lower-calorie alternatives, Costa said. A black coffee drinker herself, she recommends the Americano with a shot of pumpkin and a little milk as an alternative to the Pumpkin Pie Breve, which is made with half and half.

For those who want a truly low-calorie drink with a little fall flavor, Costa recommends coffee or a latte with stevia sweetener and cinnamon powder.

Anshutz knows from personal experience what a sugary coffee drink a day can do to the waistline. When she first started her career in health 16 years ago, she worked part-time at Starbucks. Opening the store at 4 a.m., she would have a Frappuccino or a Caramel Macchiato. “After I worked there six weeks, I could hardly get my pants on.”

Her first strategy with coffee addicts is to steer them toward a simpler drink, such as coffee with milk and even a little real sugar. Then Anshutz asks them to cut down the size. Drinking as much as 16 ounces a day is not harmful, she said, and the antioxidants in coffee might even be beneficial. Any more than that, however, is just going to dehydrate the body, she said.

Milk contains naturally occurring sugar, lactose, which can make it hard to figure out just how much added sugar is in a coffee drink. One cup of milk, which steams up to a 12-ounce latte, has 16 grams of lactose, Anshutz said. So she subtracts 16 from the sugar in any 12-ounce coffee drink to see the added sugar. Then she converts the remainder to teaspoons. (A teaspoon of sugar weighs about 4 grams.)

A 12-ounce Caramelizer from Dutch Bros. contains 33¼ grams of sugars, so that’s about 4 teaspoons of added sugar. She always asks clients whether they would heap that much sugar into a cup of coffee at home. “They always say ‘no,’” she said.

Dutch Bros. hears a lot of requests for sugar-free pumpkin sauce, Costa said, but it’s not worth adding to the menu for such a short period of time. The same goes for eggnog, which comes out Nov. 1. “Eggnog is eggnog,” she said. “You’ve got to be OK with the calories if you want to drink it.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com