Jill's Reviews > Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us

Overall, Caffeinated was....alright for me. It's not terribly difficult, I imagine, to write a decent work of non-fiction if you research a topic decently. If you pack a book with enough interesting factoids and the writing is half decent, the average reader is likely to find something worth his while in there. But to write a compelling work of non-fiction requires something more. Arguments that make you consider an alternative point of view, perhaps (Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind). Looking at an issue in a completely different manner and marshalling the facts to support this framing (Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel or James C Scott's Seeing Like a State). Or sometimes just great storytelling (Dava Sobel's Longitude).

Caffeinated for me fell into the former category. A bunch of curated facts, many of which I hadn't known before, a subset of which I found rather interesting. Some of the interesting bits - the story of K Cups and the entrepreneur, Bob Stiller, behind them; the story of an FDA that is behind the curve on understanding, much less regulating, the addition of caffeine in food, whose regulatory model is based on the assumption that coffee and tea are the primary foods by which people obtain caffeine. In reality, energy drinks like Monster Energy have overtaken coffee and tea in popularity in younger demographics. You can get caffeine from gum, from gel strips, to Kraft's MiO Energy, a "liquid water enhancer" that's basically a vial of artificial flavour, caffeine and colouring that you add to water. Even Sunkist orange soda in the US has caffeine. Yet, the FDA has yet to draft a regulatory definition for energy drinks - it does not have a regulatory definition for non-cola drinks that may contain caffeine. (By contrast, Canada restricts the caffeine content in cola type beverages and disallows adding caffeine to juices or non carbonated drinks). Who knew?