Coffee, green tea, black tea, cola, energy drinks… If you suffer with anxiety, avoiding excessive caffeine is probably a good idea, but keeping the caffeine content of all these drinks straight in your head can be tough. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of some popular beverages to help clear things up.
All drinks standardized to 8 oz or about 1 cup (McDonald’s smallest size is 12oz, so you’d have to drink about ⅔ of a McDonald’s coffee to get the 8 oz amount quoted here)
A few highlights for me:
- Short is the “hidden” option at Starbucks – most people order at least the tall (12 oz). The caffeine content here if you order a tall is about 250mg – more than triple the top caffeinated energy drink. Pretty high. For reference, Maximum Strength No Doz caffeine pills have 200mg of caffeine.
- People talk about getting their caffeine from soft drinks of various kinds. As you can see here, these individuals are getting significantly less caffeine than their Starbucks-drinking friends (and even less than their tea-drinking friends).
- Barq’s root beer has caffeine, A&W doesn’t. If you need a root beer and are very sensitive to caffeine, don’t pick Barq’s.
Data from The Mayo Clinic
If you’re interested in exploring more about caffeine content, check out Energy Fiend or Coffee In My Veins
Here’s a fun, research-informed post on the health benefits of caffeine at Home Grounds
And last but not least, if you’re feeling nerdy, Here’s a paper [pdf] examining caffeine content of specialty coffees (page 521 has an interesting table showing the variations in caffeine content of a Starbucks coffee over 6 days)
