Products targeting humans as consumers are usually meant to improve their living standards and to make life easier. Caffeine is meant to serve as a stimulant in adults but it has had some unintended negative impacts on children. This area has been understudied for children below the age of 15 years, thus inspiring the research question: are foods and beverages that target children as consumers enriched with caffeine? The goals of this research project were to: (1) determine the extent to which foods and beverages that target children as consumers are enriched with caffeine, and (2) identify products with hidden caffeine. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) was used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of food and beverage samples. High purity caffeine was used to prepare calibration standards to quantify caffeine in food and beverage samples. Among the samples analyzed, jelly beans of different colors—especially black—had approximately 16 mg/L of caffeine. Some chocolate mint-flavored candies showed chromatograms consistent with caffeine. Further analysis is being done with the incorporation of an internal standard to help improve the accuracy and precision of identification and quantification of caffeine in food and beverages.

Preliminary investigation into unintended consequences of caffeine exposure on children

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.