Johns Hopkins Publication Focuses on Food; Caffeinated Waffles on Prof.’s Agenda

Johns Hopkins Public Health, a magazine of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, has devoted a special issue to food topics and includes an article about Health Policy and Management Professor Stephen Teret, who founded the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Public Health Law and Policy and recently engaged law students in a project addressing caffeinated foods. His students reportedly explained to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy Michael Taylor that the agency should be focusing on this issue.

While Teret was apparently not concerned initially about any purported health effects of caffeine, he suspected that consumers might eat more waffles than normal if they started “feeling really good from the waffles because of the caffeine.” In this regard, he said, “It’s the sugar for some of these products or the salt or the fat that will ultimately give you health problems, not the caffeine, but, like nicotine [in cigarettes], the caffeine is what is habituating you . . . I thought that there’s something the FDA ought to be doing about it.” See Johns Hopkins Public Health, February 27, 2014.