Good morning.
Those who know me know that two of my favorite addictions (after my addiction to our magnificent Regency Nursing Centers), is my passion for running (ok, I admit, it has become an addiction) and my addiction to coffee.
I’ll lace up and leave the house on a given morning, afternoon, or evening and run anywhere from 5 to 16 miles over a few hours as I pass through several cities along the way.
I will also typically drink 3 (sometimes 4) large cups of coffee to get me through the day.
A coffee addiction doesn’t come cheaply. Coffee is expensive and the cumulative costs over a month (when you’re addicted as I am) can be quite staggering.
Regency Nursing Centers offers delicious coffee, cookies and condiments in all of our magnificent lobbies and common areas. This doesn’t go unnoticed by our grateful families and visitors, who might be similarly addicted to fine coffee as I am.
Speaking of coffee, even if you’re not among the 63 percent of Americans who drink coffee every day, caffeine is hard to avoid. It’s all over your corner store, from energy drinks to colas and bottles of iced tea to cans of Starbucks (or, as I call it, “4-bucks”) “Refreshers.”
But despite its pervasiveness, we still understand little about the stuff. It doesn’t help that the beverage industry hopes to keep it that way; for instance, though energy drink sales have skyrocketed in recent years, their manufacturers aren’t required to label how much caffeine their products contain. Meanwhile, emergency room visits related to energy drink use increased more than tenfold between 2005 to 2009.
In his new book, Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps Us, Hurts, and Hooks Us, out March 13, journalist Murray Carpenter takes on this mysterious substance. He toured Colombian coffee fields, Chinese tea lounges, and factories pumping out synthetic caffeine for soft drinks, interviewing FDA regulators, industry spokesmen, neuroscientists, and cacao cultivators.
