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It's 7 a.m., your train is late, you're exhausted and stressed, with another long day at work ahead of you.
It's the kind of moment when many of us reach for a hot drink.
But these daily pick-me-ups might come at a much higher price than the $4 you pay at the till.
A drink you buy at Starbucks could contain up to 25 teaspoons of sugar per serving, according to a new report by British campaign group Action on Sugar.
That's three times the amount of sugar in one can of Coke, and more than three times the maximum adult daily intake recommended by the American Heart Association. In a response to the report, Starbucks says it has committed to reduce sugar in its "indulgent drinks" by 25% by the end of 2020.
The research focused on drinks sold in the UK, but nutritional information published on the companies' website show that sugar levels are similar in the U.S. and elsewhere.
To find out what sugary hot drinks are doing to our bodies, CNN spoke to endocrinologist and obesity expert Dr. Tony Goldstone from Imperial College London. We asked him to lay out the health risks in the short, medium and long term.
Your body an hour later
Right about now, you may be having a sugar crash. You might be feeling "a bit sweaty, a bit sick, and disorientated," says Goldstone. You may even have a rapid pulse.
When you are consuming sugar in hot drinks, it's easy to drink a large volume of liquid in a short time, and any sugar it contains is very rapidly absorbed into the body. It would, for example, be much harder to consume the same amount of sugar if it was in the form of rice. It's one of the particular problems with sugary hot drinks, says Goldstone.
"Obviously there are a lot of genetic predispositions," Goldstone adds.
What's unnerving is that you can store a lot of fat around your organs without necessarily looking overweight.
Goldstone has scanned the livers and abdomens of middle-aged men who sit in their offices a lot and says he "can be quite shocked" at what shows up.
"Inactivity, alcohol, sugar, genetics" can all affect the way the body stores fat, says Goldstone, adding that, "You don't necessarily know it -- just like you can have high blood pressure and not know it -- you can have fat in the your liver and abdomen and not know it."
He says that exercise is key: "You may not lose much weight when you exercise, but you may have more muscle and less fat. Exercise helps get rid of fat in the liver and tummy -- fat in the liver is very sensitive to exercise. Fit and fat is better than not fat and unfit."
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