... Ever since Howard Schultz and his now-ubiquitous Starbucks outlets turned us on to the pleasures of very strong, often Venti-sized coffee, Americans have been guzzling copious, recently unprecedented, amounts of java. Per capita national coffee consumption, which had been on the decline since the forties, has risen almost 20 percent since 1995, and the amount of caffeine we consume has almost surely shot up even more than that. Starbucks and its competitors may not be Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson (companies that deliberately conspired to get us hooked on known carcinogens), but they’re certainly not shy caffeine enablers. Coffee shops now beckon from every other corner (Dare can choose from three Starbucks stores within 500 feet of his office). Serving sizes are far bigger than they used to be (a Starbucks Venti is twice the size of a traditional corner-coffee-shop cup). And a typical cup of coffee is, ounce for ounce, a lot stronger than it once was. A Wall Street Journal laboratory analysis of the caffeine levels in takeout coffees found that the coffee served at Starbucks and other gourmet coffee shops had more than 50 percent more caffeine than traditional drip coffee.
Read the rest of the guide to caffeine addiction.
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