Study: Kids All Hopped Up On Caffeine

Study: Kids All Hopped Up On Caffeine
By Jaya Saxena in Food on December 20, 2010 4:08 PM
The Gothamist

Remember when you were a kid and you'd beg your parents to let you order a Coke at a restaurant but they told you you were too young to have caffeine and you spent the rest of the meal plotting the phone call you were going to place to child protective services when you got home?* Apparently that was just us, because according to a new study [pdf], 75% of kids between the ages of 5 and 12 consume caffeine on a daily basis. Though it's based on a relatively small survey of 201 kids, Dr. William Warzak says, "Some children as young as 5 years old were consuming the equivalent of a can of soda a day." Let's just start the total caffeine ban countdown now.

Aside from having 5-year-olds running around like speed freaks, the study says that the more caffeine the children consumed, the less they slept. Dr. Warzak told the Daily News, "Caffeine is not some boogie man, but at some point for all of us, too much caffeine is a problem." Doctors also said more research needed to be done on whether or not caffeine can stunt a child's development. Meanwhile, we're on our third cup of coffee of the day. But we can quit whenever we want.

* CPS vehemently denies this ever happens