Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Coffee Does A Body Good? What About Caffeine?

Disclaimer: I have a Starbucks card.

After wrtiting yesterday's post regarding weight loss while eating daily at Starbucks, I managed to stumble upon a nice summary of the benefits of coffee published last month in a Medscape slideshow entitled Coffee: The Original Wonder Drug?  Of course, this isn't the first time I've written about the virtues of coffee (see my 3 part series earlier this summer among others).

Of course, given that caffeine is one of the major ingredients in coffee, it makes one wonder whether the benefit is from the caffeine or from the flavanoids found in coffee.  In fact, just last year, several studies were published linking consumption of large amounts of energy drinks to caffeine toxicity.  To add fuel to the fire, 5 deaths have been linked to Monster Energy drinks in a report released by the Food & Drug Administration yesterday as reported by the New York Times.

So what do we do with this disparate & superficial data?  First, let's not jump to any conclusions. While reports of injury to the FDA greatly underestimate the danger of any given drug or device, we still don't have any proof that energy drinks caused these 5 deaths.  And while any death is tragic and it's easy for me to parent from afar, this article does make me question what my 13yo drinks in any given day - hopefully not 48 ounces of high fructose corn syrup laden with 480mg of caffeine!  

Rather than my usual, I think I'm going to have an ice coffee the next time I stop by Starbucks.



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