Now You Can Inhale Your Caffeine — Literally - Food News - Cooking

Now You Can Inhale Your Caffeine — Literally

No Comments | Written on February 9, 2012 at 1:00 pm, by Lesley Kennedy

AeroShot

Forget cream and sugar; for that matter, forget coffee altogether. For those that want to skip the pour entirely and get their daily caffeine fix even quicker, say hello to AeroShot, a lemon-lime flavored caffeine powder that you inhale through a little plastic canister.

You’ve been warned.

The equivalent to a big cup of coffee, AeroShot, at $2.99 a pop, boasts 100 milligrams of caffeine (and some B vitamins), the Huffington Post reports. It’s been on shelves at convenience and liquor stores in New York and Massachusetts since debuting last month, and it’s also available online.

This may come as a jolt, but David Edwards, the Harvard biomedical engineering professor who invented AeroShot, says the stuff is safe — better for you than the energy drinks on the market, at any rate.

“Even with coffee — if you look at the reaction in Europe to coffee when it first appeared — there was quite a bit of hysteria,” he told HuffPo. “So anything new, there’s always some knee-jerk reaction that makes us believe ‘Well, maybe it’s not safe.’”

AeroShot labels say to limit yourself to three canisters a day, but experts such as Dr. Lisa Ganjhu, an internal medicine doctor and gastroenterologist, warn that you shouldn’t go crazy with caffeine.

“You want those 10 cups of coffee, it will probably take you a couple hours to get through all that coffee with all that volume that you are drinking,” she tells HuffPo. “With these inhale caffeine canisters, you can get that in 10 of those little canisters — so you just puff away and you could be getting all of that within the hour.”

And you thought keeping your kids away from Red Bull was worrisome.

AreoShot also seems to worry Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is asking for a product review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

AeroShot

Us? We’ll continue brewing our morning coffee and hitting up Starbucks for a late afternoon latte. Because huffing lemon-lime just doesn’t go with our daily newspaper. And it certainly doesn’t go well with scones.