Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy(theexamination.org) |
Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy(theexamination.org) |
Those suckers are bizarrely addictive. It's one thing to have one shortly after you wake up, but I found myself craving them later and later in the day, and of course that makes it harder to sleep...which makes me more likely to have energy drinks the next day.
I stopped the daily consumption when I realized I was having around 800mg of caffeine a day, which couldn't possibly be good for me. I quit energy drinks cold turkey and just did Diet Coke, which I cut off at 2pm; even with that weening off I still got headaches and felt miserable for three days.
I will still occasionally consume an energy drink if I'm traveling and I need to wake up super early, but thankfully these are very outlier events.
A 500ml Diet Coke (assuming you don't mean the caffeine free version) also contains about 65 mg of caffeine, which is the same as an espresso. I'm not sure if you really quit. Caffeine is also in a surprisingly large amount of soft drinks you wouldn't expect.
After Getting Older™, I was noticing more and more effects that I didn't like, so I made the decision to (mostly) detox off caffeine using decaf beans. Cold turkey would have destroyed me. I went with the following schedule:
* Week 1: 75% caffeinated/25% decaf beans
* Week 2: 50% caf/50% decaf
* Week 3: 25% caf/75% decaf
* Week 4: 100% decaf
At week 4, I entered a full failure mode I hadn't yet experienced, namely migraines that were untouchable by OTC medications. Only caffeine helped. I tried to get through the week to "be done" with the weening but couldn't. So...
* Week 5: back up to 25% caf/75% decaf!
* Weeks 6-12: decreasing caffeine by half each week (to the point I was measuring beans using my home scale).
After week 12, I was able to go without caffeine, and now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.
My physiological dependence on caffeine was no joke, but I feel a heck of a lot less anxious and jittery after cutting it down to where I'm now at.
I stopped getting acute headaches after about three days; other prolonged side effects are harder to quantify.
I should also clarify, it wasn't 800mg every day (which I realize I didn't make clear), it was just one thing where I saw that at least a few days of the last week I had consumed 800mg.
I couldn't even get away from 2 cups/day until i started hyperbolic tapering by slowly mixing decaf into my regular beans.
People at the office sometimes ask me how I manage to get up in the morning and be in a good mood without having a cup of coffee. I suspect that most of them are only in a bad mood after waking up because they have mild caffeine widthrawal.
( don't "ask me how i know" ! )
Just rinse it off with water?
I will say, though, energy drinks do become a relatively expensive addiction. A Monster energy drink can easily cost 3-4 dollars, so if I had three of those a day we are talking $10+ of cost. If you get off brands they're cheaper, but even still I think they're overpriced.
I know it's a meme that people pay like $6 for a coffee at Starbucks, but I think if you buy the coffee beans yourself or instant coffee it's relatively cheap.
I don't really have trouble keeping myself to, like, 1.2 coffees a day. I can't imagine drinking 6-7 coffees in a day to get to 800 mg caffeine.
Unless you add ice or sweetener it's bitter and hot, so it's a lot harder to slide down the slippery slope of just drinking it whenever you're thirsty and simultaneously getting addicted to the caffeine and the sugar. To say nothing of whatever else is in the energy drinks.
Although I guess plenty of people who drive a lot do this with the sugary Starbucks drinks in the giant mugs.
- Water - Sugar - Vitamin B - Caffeine
and the caffeine is basically equivalent to one cup of coffee.
- mixing alcohol and energy drinks (health-wise, e.g. arrhythmia)
- mixing alcohol and energy drinks (psychologically, e.g. increased risky behavior)
- age restriction on energy drinks to prevent kids from drinking them
i am not positive how i feel on the first two. i could be convinced that the third is reasonable for some age group, though i think it would be silly to ban it for all under-21s.
From that perspective I think that an argument could be made that restricting caffinated alcohol is regulating substances with known health risks.
Full disclosure: I like vodka Redbulls. So I'm not saying this like I'm someone who is moral panicking.
Drinking some coffee at 6 and 10 though before a night out, good move. Where I am, the nights can go to 4 or 6 easily.
I'm not going to pretend I'm a saint and I only ever sip mineral water or kombucha (although I do like both), but that stuff sends people crazy in a long term way I've not seen before. I'd rather people were slightly tipsy after a lunch in the local pub than on that stuff.
Energy drinks in the fridge at a job sort of signals that this company is part of that "grindset hustle culture" startup, which itself likes to employ a certain..."type".
I wonder if there was a pre-existing condition. And... three ???
She's fine now. Dancin on TikTok like everyone else
Humans are by default irrational, especially when it comes to health theater. We waste endless resources with organic farming and trying to figure out what we even mean when we call something ultra processed, because we want to eat what feels right, and we don't care a smidgen how often data supports our intuition, we just care that on the off chance it does, we amplify that research while ignoring everything else. (See also: https://xkcd.com/882/)
It doesn't take a big corporate overlord to wish addictive substances were healthy; we're always looking for an excuse to rationalize them. So what if fresh grapes have all the antioxidants we can use, we like to drink wine so we're only going to talk about wine having antioxidants. Plus, it turns out that people with bad health stop drinking wine, so surely that's why they have bad health. Is coffee and tea messing up our sleep and destroying our teeth? Well, lets try and find something good about it, or some variation of it, and ignore the probability that other foods could give us the same benefits without the side effects.
This doesn't mean a well designed experiment, instead of a biased study or meta analysis, can't find useful information, but it does mean you'll need to dig to find it. It also doesn't mean that we have to be teetotalers to be healthy, but being addicted to something can make it more difficult.
The best case is it does no harm.
Im definitely in the minority but there’s just zero value to me in drinking an energy drink. If you need energy that bad, there’s several options that are less artificial with similar effects.
I’ve tasted a Celsius here and there, don’t get me wrong. I get the appeal, but it’s just silly to not consider the health effects. I’m also anti-syrup and sodas so I’m a bit odd I guess.
I haven't really noticed any, or heard much studies that wouldn't apply to similar amounts of coffee at least. Do the other supplemented ingredients add a lot of harm?
No it’s not. The best case it gives you energy (it’s in the name!) to do whatever you want and it does no harm.
Assuming it actually does no harm, why wouldn’t you want more energy any time you want it, any time you drink some delicious fizzy neon green liquid?
I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t drink energy drink (because I assume and feel that it actually causes harm, not because I couldn’t use some extra boost in energy sometimes).
Isn't it pretty obvious that people drink them for... energy?
Energy drink company slyly changed energy drink policy! Hell, I figured the wall on the White House would be a ~~Brando~~ Red Bull logo, but even in Idiocracy, that president took advice from real experts.
The story seems to be grain alcohol is as healthy for the human body as rainwater or mother's milk, its only the evil mixer that is causing ALL the problems. The problem isn't getting drunk and going driving, or getting drunk and going swimming, its... the mixer. Uh huh.
The story and the moral panic over it is big alcoholic energy. Now go out and have the standard several daily servings of ethanol, as long as you stay away from those evil energy drinks I'm sure you'll be OK because they're the only problem WRT excessive alcohol consumption.
The answer is No. It is none of your business. Go live your life and quit trying to control others, which is all this nonsense is about.
* Some young man downed 6 beers and "several" energy drinks, then dove into a lake, and subsequently died. His mother said that he grew up near a lake and a was a good swimmer, so their conclusion was to blame energy drinks.
* An 18 year old woman downed 10 jagerbombs (a mix of jagermeister liquor and an energy drink) and subsequently had multiple cardiac arrests. The conclusion, again, was that it happened due to some unique properties of energy drinks, and not the fact that she consumed an equivalent of 10 energy drinks+10 shots of hard liquor in a short timespan. Too much of almost anything is bad, and I have no idea what other outcome was expected here after consuming crazy amounts of liquor and caffeine like this.
* A 17 year old man died from alcohol poisoning after mixing alcohol and energy drinks (unspecified amounts of each), and that's somehow the fault of energy drinks instead of alcohol.
I am just baffled that they couldn't find more convincing examples, given how they claimed it was such a serious and prevalent issue.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/business/panera-lawsuit-charg...
a jagerbomb is not typically an entire energy drink. it's typically 3oz/90ml of energy drink. 10 jagerbombs would be ~3 redbulls. (which is still obviously a lot of energy drink and alcohol in a short time)
I'm drinking a sugar-free Monster at the moment. The list is way longer than that. It also contains citric acid, erythritol, taurine, sodium citrate, natural & artificial flavors, L-carnitine L-tartrate, sucralose, sorbic acid, benzoic acid, ester gum, acesulfame potassium, inositol.
taste is subjective. i dont drink them often, but i enjoy a can of original green monster occasionally because i find it tastes good.
But besides that, energy drinks are an easy consistent way of getting exact amounts of caffeine. I drink pre-workout before gym days for that exact reason since it's a lot easy to get 200mg of caffine via one cold 10oz drink than trying to brew and chug two hot coffees at 8am.
Plus occasionally there's non caffeinated benefits; the Monster Rehab line really does seem to help in the morning after a night of hard drinking.
I suppose I could bring instant coffee and drink it at room temperature or cold, but that seems sub-optimal.
I used to just carry caffeine pills with me, but people thought I was some kind of drug addict.
So, a real answer instead of "it doesn't"
- It doesn't taste like coffee. Relatively flavorful, but obviously a bit on the artificial side
- I drink a Celsius when I am targeting minimal stomach disruption (e.g. before a run or before intensive cardio)
- I drink a Celsius when I don't want to wait for the coffee-maker during early morning hours.
- I drink Celsius if I run out of creamer (for coffee), something I don't need anyways but I like.
- Cold brew is acceptable substitute if I don't have a Celsius.
- Normal brewed coffee otherwise.
Energy drinks don’t.
Tea does fuck all for me caffeine wise unless I drink a full ass thermos of it. Mate kinda works but drinking it is a performance and a process.
How do you not know that different things taste good to different people?
They are consistent. They are cold. They are fast.
There is none of the variation that you have in a single cup of coffee.
The preparation process is pulling a tab. No French press, no aero press, no coffee maker, scale, grinder, bags.
They don’t warm me up, I don’t have to cool them down.
I can carry them with me and drink them when I feel like drinking them without needing to worry about them leaking.
They don’t stain clothes. Or teeth (but they do eat them)
They lack the biological enzyme that coffee has that causes you to rush to the toilet. Any bowel effect is purely from the caffeine and not the passengers that come along in coffee.
I like the colors and designs.
I don’t have to feel like I’m participating in massive Third World exploitation to enjoy caffeine.
Black coffee tastes bad, so it requires milk and sugar, but I like to avoid drinking my calories.
The powdered fast stuff taste like shit.
You never know what beans public places are using and if you’re even getting enough caffeine for your needs.
<jk> Coffee doesn’t give you wings. </jk>
So, we can haggle over details, but overall I don't see a dramatic qualitative difference.
Still not saying it's healthy but it wasn't because of too much sugar.
Eventually I transitioned to the Aldi brand which was I think around $1.
I've not been a fan of them myself since I was a teenager years ago, but I've worked with quite a few people in all sorts of roles, whose drink of choice was whatever their favourite energy drink was, either having one occasionally or between one and a few a day, while being completely relaxed, mature, and just nothing to do with any sort of stereotypes you might think of in connection with energy drinks.
That’s the difference. What’s an extreme amount of caffeine compared to most people is presented as the normal servicing size. So the next step up is 2 of them.
Anyway, any concept of a "standard" coffee is substantially smaller and weaker than what any variant in the US actually is in practice, where espresso-based drinks nearly universally use 2-3 shots and drip coffees are poured in sizes ranging from voluminous to biblical flood. An 8 ounce cup of coffee is just unrealistically small here.
My point is just that 16 ounces of drip is not a "huge" amount of coffee in the US. It's pretty normal. Especially if you account for people going back for a second cup. I make no arguments about whether it's a good or bad thing.
That’s 6-12% of a 16 ounce serving and even more of your “nearly” 16oz beverage.
McDonald’s is known for having strong coffee and a double espresso from them is under 150mg.
I guess it's cheaper in Europe.
"Oh no!"
> McDonald’s is known for having strong coffee and a double espresso from them is under 150mg.
That's not strong then. Anyway,
Original Green Monster: 160 mg per 16 fl oz can.
Monster Ultra / Zero Sugar: 150 mg per 16 fl oz can.
Monster Lo-Carb: 140 mg per 16 fl oz can.