Thursday, January 24, 2008

Addicted to decaf


Almost every morning, I walk with the dog to Starbucks and order a decaf Americano. Sometimes I get strange looks from the people around me since I'm ordering decaf. "What kind of idiot drinks decaf in the MORNING?" I'm sure they're thinking. I gave caffeine up about 3-4 years ago and I don't regret it. However, I still crave decaf coffee in the morning. I always thought it was psychological. Some kind of attachment to a warm, bitter, creamy (clearly I put creamer in my coffee) drink after I wake up. That is, until I found out that Starbucks decaf still has caffeine in it. Now all decaf has a little caffeine in it; usually around 5 milligrams. In a Consumer Reports study, the decaf coffee at about about half of the places they tested had 5 or less mg of caffeine. However, decaf at Starbucks, Seattle's Best and Dunkin' Dounuts all had over 20 mg of caffeine per cup! That's about 20% the caffeine in a normal cup of coffee.


No wonder I crave decaf in the morning. I'm hooked on the caffeine!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I found out almost the same way about 6 months ago. I stopped drinking caffeine almost altogether except for the occasional soda. Then when I started missing the Starbucks coffee, I thought decaf made sense.

I didn't even know until a friend of mine pointed out that there was still some caffeine in it. By the time I got to drinking less soda, I started to feel the caffeine in the decaf since I was more sensitive to it by that point.