Caffeine: coffee has it. Do you love it? Are you hooked on it? Does your daily constant physical interaction with this substance kind of scare you when you think about it? Turns out there’s a lot of research happening on the subject right now. Our staff writer Alex Bernson coagulates the recent findings.

If there’s a single point of agreement in the currently booming world of academic caffeine research, it’s that nobody can actually agree on anything. For example, in one recent study some researchers went to a single Starbucks location and sampled a 16oz cup of the Breakfast Blend over six consecutive days.

The caffeine content of those cups ranged from 259.2mg to 564.4mg, as documented by energyfiend.com. The FDA says “experts agree that 600 mg (four to seven cups of coffee) of caffeine or more each day is too much.” Why does the FDA have such a radically different figure for caffeine/per cup, and if a 16oz cup of Breakfast Blend can come dangerously close to “too much”, then why hasn’t the FDA regulated caffeine content in coffee or in the exploding energy drink market?

The answer is that caffeine dosage is a ...