Just say no to Starbucks!

Wow.. Kaiser Permanente just came out with a rather definitive (or so they claim) study on just how bad caffeine is for pregnancy.
http://ckp.kp.org/newsroom/national/archive/nat_080121_caffeine.html
2 cups of coffee a day (200mg/day) = 2x chance of miscarriage and for those consuming less (but still consuming compared to none), 40% greater chance. Also it seems that the caffeine can come from tea, soda, and other source so it's not really coffee specific. So, I decided to look up just how much caffeine there is in some of the daily stuff we consume and found this link to the caffeine content..
http://www.cspinet.org/new/cafchart.htm

And voila, no wonder Starbucks is addictive.. A Grande Starbucks coffee contains a startling 320 mg of caffeine, or about 1.6x the amount that was considered "high" in the KP study. It's about 160mg per standard 8 oz serving, which is apparently higher than the average of 133mg. The chart is pretty useful in that it also shows the caffeine content in a bunch of other food, so it's quite useful since the KP study pointed out that the key link to miscarriage is caffeine and not coffee.

Fortunately, Sandy is not a big coffee, soda, or tea drinker and doesn't like dark chocolate,. If it's up to me to give up caffeine, it may be much more difficult. It's also interesting that over the counter drugs such as Excedrin (2 tablets) can contain as much as 130 mg of caffeine.. If you take 4 or 6 of these pills a day, it can get to some dangerous levels. I guess if I get drowsy at work next time, I can take a couple of them with my coffee for the extra kick :D

And yes, I'm blogging at 4 AM in the morning.. Maybe I had too much caffeine in my diet :(