The Frappuccino generation

A thoughtful coworker passed this on to me in response to my new and actively sought out new habit: coffee. Unfortunately, since I am not as vain as a teenage girl, I get the calories from the vanilla latte and those from lunch. Excerpt:

"Think $4," says Giana. "That's what you pay for lunch. Not for coffee and lunch. Coffee is lunch. It's like the new mashed potatoes. Coffee is comfort food, especially when it rains..." Those sugary, creamy coffee drinks are packed with enough calories to make a can of Dr. Pepper seem like Slim-Fast... Michele Simon, director of the Center for Informed Food Choices in Oakland, takes a dimmer view. "What Starbucks is doing is taking a beverage that has traditionally been consumed by adults, and making it attractive to children with sugar and fat. They're using milk and sweetener as a way to soften the bitterness. You can even think of it as a gateway drug..." Caffeine is the world's most widely used mood-altering drug, and it doesn't take much to get hooked. Dr. Roland Griffiths, professor of behavioral biology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has found that as little as 100 milligrams of caffeine a day can produce a dependency that will induce withdrawal symptoms in many adults, ranging from headache to fatigue to inability to concentrate. There's more caffeine than that in a single cup of Starbucks coffee. Just three consecutive days of caffeine at that dosage can produce those symptoms when the stimulant fades.

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