Healthy drink choices in Japan

Japan offers a large variety of healthy drink choices when it comes to green tea, however, there are also a lot of drinks you can find in vending machines and convenience stores that contain quite a lot of sugar.

Best Choices - Water and Tea

Your best choices for healthy drinks are water and tea. You can usually find mineral water in all vending machines and convenience stores. Water hydrates your body without any calories or added sugar. But beware of flavoured water as these usually come with some sugar, e.g. the flavoured water from Irohas has around 18 to 19 calories per 100ml most of them being from sugar.

Most green tea that you can buy in Japan comes without added sugar. There are some variants of black tea in pet bottles that come with added sugar and all milk tea variants usually come with sugar as well. Green tea has a lot of health benefits, but you might not want to drink too much as it also contains caffeine.

You can also find tea options without caffeine, like Mugi-cha (barley tea), Soba tea or decaffeinated variants of green tea.

Most teas can be purchased ready to drink in pet bottles but you can also get tea bags to make your own tea at home, which usually is cheaper.

Sometimes OK choices - Zero variants

In Japan, you can also find zero calories variants of some drinks. The most popular is probably Cola Zero. Pepsi also has a zero-calorie variant of their cola. You can also find zero calories variant of Clapis drinks, some sports drinks and C.C. lemon.

With these kinds of drinks, you don't consume any calories or sugar but the science community is still not sure about how the sweeteners affect the human body. Also, with drinks like coke, the sugar is not the only health risk. Coke has a very low ph-value, and the acid contained damages your teeth. Coke also contains caffeine but you can find a non-caffeine variant in supermarkets. In general, I think zero variants are not as bad as their sugar counterparts but should still only be consumed in small amounts.

Coffee and coffee products

Most vending machines offer a variety of coffee products. Whereas coffee is ok in small amounts, a lot of coffee products come with added sugar and/or milk. If it says 無糖 on the package it does not contain any sugar.

You should also watch out when ordering Starbucks blended coffee drinks. Some of these contain around 500 calories and over 20 grams of fat, which is about as much as a normal meal contains.

What are your preferred drink choices in Japan?