Personally, when I'm craving sweet, dairy-tastic tea, I go for sweetened condensed milk. Yup, the kind in a can that you use to make pumpkin pie. I find that the intense flavor of it allows me to use less than I would use sugar and milk (or cream), but it's seriously delicious. Learned it from a friend who spent time in Western Africa and picked up the habit there. Mmmm.

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I used to be a heavy soda drinker. Talking like 6-7 cans a day. Then I changed to diet soda and drank that for about 10 years. 2 Years ago I went back to regular soda but cut down to 1-2 a day, and then 1 year ago I cut down soda to 1-2 cans a week. Now I drink primarily water (all day while I'm at work) and plain unsweetened iced tea (and maybe once a day I have a vitamin water). You just have to get used to it. It's a long process but it's doable.

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Honey!
I drink green tea with honey (no milk as I am allergic)

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i can totally sympathise, i dring about 5 big (20+oz.) cups a day. good black english tea. and i drink it english style, sweet (raw sugar) strong (2 bags) and milky. but about two months ago, in an effort to cut back on sugar i tried to go wihtout the sugar. it's a struggle, but i have finally gotten used to it. i will indulge once in a while, but it's not too bad. the better the tea, the easier it is. but you might want to check on the benefits of tea that has added milk. i read that they are trying to say that milk negates the benefit. but that dosn't matter to me, since my tea has more caffine than coffee.

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It doesn't sound like you are a tea drinker, either. More of a tea-flavored Kool Aid drinker...

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You did read the blog post right before yours right? Milk with your tea could very well be canceling out the benefits of tea...

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"And I use fat free milk in my tea too."

Actually, the milk's not helping matters either, it looks like. And one black tea bag has half the caffeine as a 5 oz. cup of coffee; green tea has a quarter the caffeine.

Not that you have to care, necessarily, if your main concern is taste. But it's good information to have if you're drinking tea for the health benefits.

Try gradually subbing out sugar for Splenda; start with three sugars, one Splenda. You may find that you can eventually get rid of all or most of the sugar as your tastebuds gradually adjust.

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I used to use sugar in my tea also, but found that with high quality tea and proper steeping - I don't need the sugar at all. However, I do still like milk with my black tea - 2% works for me, adds a bit of richness and deliciuosness that I can do without in the mornings.

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Hm, 16 sugar packets/day is 16 teaspoons, or 64 grams of sugar, for 256 calories. Compare that to the sugar in a single 12 oz can of Coca-Cola, which is 39 grams of sugar (well, HFCS). So, you're drinking a bit less than 2 cokes a day worth of sweetener, which is not good, but not horrible.

You might try 1/2 Splenda and 1/2 sugar in your tea. That's what I do for my (one) cup of coffee a day, and it's fine, while pure Spenda tastes weirdly metallic to me...

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I don't know what kind of tea you drink, but it's possible that with better tea you might enjoy the tea without milk or sugar. If you're drinking Lipton, you can definitely do better :-) A good looseleaf, single estate Darjeeling or Ceylon has wonderful flavor and doesn't need any adulteration.

Check out Imperial Tea Court - http://www.imperialtea.com/ - or Todd & Holland - http://www.todd-holland.com/ - for some great tea (I'm not associated with either of them, just a customer). Unfortunately, it's more expensive and takes a bit longer to prepare but it's well worthwhile and a little goes a long way.

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Are you sure you like tea? With four packets of sugar, plus some milk, I'm not sure how much tea there is to taste. You put the same amount of sugar in one cup of tea that I put in an entire pitcher of unsweetened Kool-Aid.

If you cut back gradually, you'll get used to consuming less sugar.

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Wow, thats a lot of sugar per cup of tea! My girlfriend used to hate tea but what I would do is put some zest in the tea while it was steeping to get some of that citrusy goodness in there and now she's an addict like I am.

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I have one word for you: stevia. It's an herb, so it's a natural, whole food, rather than a super-refined substance, like sugar. Anyway, it doesn't raise your glucose level, but it tastes really sweet. Super sweet, in fact--on par with artificial sweeteners, so you just need a tiny bit. It's been used in Peru for hundreds of years, and comprises around 40% of the artificial sweetener market in Japan, where they're a little stricter about artificial substances, so aspartame is not legal. Anyway, you can get stevia in liquid or powder forms at health food stores. The liquid works really well in tea or other drinks.

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4 packs is kind of a lot of sugar, but if you are using cheap teabag tea you need it to cover the bitterness. I like Adagio Tea http://www.adagio.com - their "Ceylon Sonata" is like "regular tea" (lipton, etc) - but good. Smooth and not bitter. You might only need 2 sugars to get the same effect.

And it's not very expensive - 10-14¢ per cup, which might be less than teabags.

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Aside from the calories, the sugar isn't necessarily bad for you. It's certainly not bad like High Fructose Corn Syrup is completely evil.

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There's a tea I picked up in Seattle called Market Spice which has no sugar in it, but something in the oils they flavor it with makes it very sweet (so much so I can barely drink it, I don't take sugar in my tea). It's available for order on the Internet.

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I'll second the call for stevia. I use the powder--just a itsy pinch--with my green tea. Much healthier than sugar!

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And yet a third vote for stevia! Can order it online at stevia.com. They've also got some cool liquid stevia in flavors like cinnamon, apricot, lemon, chocolate, etc. Just put a few drops (very few, Stevia is really sweet) in carbonated water for a truly healthy soda. Or in or on anything else you like.

And please trash that Splenda. If you haven't read "Sweet Deception" by Dr. Joseph Mercola, find a copy before you put another bite or drop of artificial sugar in you rmouth -- and Splenda is totally artificial no matter how much spin they put on it coming from real sugar. T'aint so.

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Yes, adding milk to tea may cancel out the benefits of the tea, but it isn't a harmful beverage, which means you can simply enjoy it for what it is -- a hot milky tea beverage. If you're drinking tea for the flavanoids, don't add milk. If you're drinking milky tea because it's comforting and has the flavor you like, milk away and throw the reports in the rubbish bin.

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Stevia tastes unbelievably disgusting to me; I've tried it several times with the same result. I found it sickeningly sweet and I don't consider it a substitute for real sugar. I used to drink my tea with sugar, then when I was on one of my health kicks, I gradually decreased the amount of sugar in my tea, eventually putting in none. I now drink black tea without any sugar and truly like it much better than with. And believe me, I have a serious sweet tooth, including putting plenty of sugar in cappuccino and eating a lot of chocolate and other sweets.

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