Do you trust your coffee barista?
Oh, you can trust him to charge you an arm and two legs for your cuppa joe. But if you ask for your java decaffeinated, do you trust that's what you'll get? Studies show that somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of supposedly decaffeinated coffee and tea is actually fairly high in caffeine, says MIT's Technology Review.
How can you be sure? Some java junkies claim that it's easy to tell the difference -- decaf tastes horrible, they say.
The good news is that there's a new test kit that can help you tell the difference between high octane and unleaded java. A strip of paper soaks up your joe from a sample and after about 30 seconds antibodies in the strip produce colored lines should it contain caffeine.
The D+caf test strips can tell with 98 percent accuracy whether a six ounce cup of coffee has more than 20mg of caffeine, according to its manufacturer Silver Lake Research Corp. out of Monrovia, CA. The process involves a lateral flow immunoassay, similar to the technology used in home pregnancy tests.
The bad news is that the test strips cost a whopping $9.95 for a 20-pack of strips. That's expensive. But it's still less than half the cost of diabetic test strips.
Too bad there isn't a test strip you could use on mortgage lenders, Wall Street brokers and bankers, and federal regulators. Before signing anything -- you could stick them with your test strip (don't ask me to tell you WHERE) and the lateral flow immunoassay would tell you whether or not they are lying. Now that's a test strip that I would buy !
CONTINUE READING ABOUT "Caffeine is in Everything."
READ ABOUT CAFFEINE FACTS AT "ABC'S OF CAFFEINE."
By Sharon McEachern
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