▲ 167 points
back
251 comments
I have always hated coffee so I've previously had some kind of energy drink in the morning for weeks at a time.
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.
You're describing caffeine addiction. This also happens with coffee.
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.
Feeling miserable for three days seems ... unlikely after 800mg/day of caffeine. I say that to mean, it should be much longer (been there, done that, took many months) Caffeine use especially at that level massively grows the amount adenosine receptors your brain has, and they don't just disappear overnight.
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.
I swore off energy drinks in high school after someone brought a case of them on the bus to a football game and I drank one and got horrible diarrhea and had to shit in the woods at halftime.
I like energy drinks, but I prefer coffee. I drink my coffee black. About the only time I drink an energy drink for these past few years is when driving long distances. I don't like the chemicals used in sugar free sodas/energy drinks, and I don't like consuming a lot of unnecessary sugar, I also really like the flavor of properly prepared coffee. I go through phases, but I generally just have 1-2 cups in the morning and that's it, but when I'm driving I might have 3-5 energy drinks over the course of 8-10 hours of driving. I understand the appeal, but it's just never hooked me the way people talk about them.
Consuming that much caffeine is terrible for your heart.
If you find yourself consuming a lot of caffeine regularly, you would probably be much better served by Adderall. You can get the same stimulant effect with much less wear and tear on your body. If you want to put it to the test without breaking the law or going through the hassle of getting a prescription, you can try taking 1 or 2 Sudafed (the real stuff that requires ID), which I've found to be functionally equivalent to a low dose of Adderall.
(The normal caveats about health risks of stimulants apply to this comment - avoid if you have a heart condition, etc.)
I make my own all natural energy drink. I too don’t like coffee much, no matter how hard I’ve tried, but also those things have a lot of chemicals other than caffeine in them.
You can buy powdered caffeine derived from green tea. I do bottling including my own sodas so I have ready access and you might have to buy at least 1 lb, which is a lot of caffeine, but it’s worth it for your health.
I don’t drink more than 200mg in a day and usually not even that much so maybe I’m at a gram a week-ish. So a lb would last me for over 8 years.
Get a jewelers scale and you’re good to go
> Those suckers are bizarrely addictive
Caffeine and sugar, both are addictive.
For me personally, I find sugar much harder to drop, than caffeine. I wonder how it is for other people.
> I quit energy drinks cold turkey
coke etc will destroy your teeth, if not cleaned off regularly.
( don't "ask me how i know" ! )
I mean, you could say the same thing about coffee.
In Scotland in the early 2000s, there was a moral panic over a tonic wine called Buckfast, made in Buckfast Abbey by an order of Benedictine monks.
It's the kind of thing meant for your granny to have when sick. It contains caffeine and alcohol, and neds started drinking it because caffeine and alcohol both feel good (humans have known this for thousands of years).
It quickly became part of the local youth culture, and was quickly blamed for all the deep-seated anti-social behaviour issues prevalent in the region. It was known as 'wreck the hoose juice'. Breathless tabloid headlines were written, schlocky documentaries were made (I was made to watch one in school), and politicians started laying the blame at supermarkets for selling the stuff.
The big supermarkets stopped selling it of their own accord, and still don't to this day. They were hurt by the bad PR and like to get ahead of regulation, which is not toothless in the UK. Buckie, with it's now notorious reputation, started to be drank by artsy pretentious students instead of violent neds. And would you believe it, when it was drank by this different demographic, the problems magically disappeared!
My point being, observational studies are useless here because only a certain kind of person is consuming a drink called 'FCKED UP'. Caffeine is one of the most well-studied drugs in medicine, and we know it's safe. Evidence to the contrary would have to be strong, not be anecdotal or observational.
I'm personally a much bigger fan of Vin Mariani. It's a wine made with cocaine alkaloids and endorsed by the pope. Unfortunately not as popular as it was in 1863...
> made in Buckfast Abbey by an order of Benedictine monks.
Historically, yes, but after they lost their license to sell wine (a century ago) they licensed the name to a drinks business that scaled production up and changed the recipe.
I really don't know why people go so nuts over energy drinks. People casually chug coffee like crazy and then act like you're drinking nuclear waste when you drink a monster, and then you look at the ingredients list and it's like
- Water - Sugar - Vitamin B - Caffeine
and the caffeine is basically equivalent to one cup of coffee.
I am with you here, especially given that the examples listed in the article were basically:
* 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.
It's cultural.
Rave kids who listen to melodic dubstep drink Ghost because they like everything brightly-colored and artificial. Good ole' boys blowing stuff up in the woods drink Bucked Up or Rip It because they work hard and want something grab-and-go from Wal-Mart. Gamers love Bawls (or whatever the equivalent is now) because it tastes refreshing and keeps them up all night at LAN parties.
Coffee is for sophisticates who do yoga and listen to NPR and pay taxes and have jobs. It's unprocessed (drying, roasting, and fermenting be damned) whereas energy drinks are made in a factory. How would you rather imbibe your psychoactive insecticide: the natural way? Or the ARTIFICIAL way?!
Side note (as a guy with single origin beans in his freezer and an Aeropress): AMP Energy slapped and they should bring it back.
To me the surprising thing is how much sugar people are willing to drink, but I think the same thing when my friend drinks Coca Cola.
I drink black coffee, no sugar
I'm not "going nuts" over energy drinks, but the key ingredient is not caffeine, it is sugar
The evidence has been mounting for decades, sugary drinks are devastating public health
Monster has roughly the same amount of caffeine per volume as black coffee but their standard size is 16oz which is a huge cup of undiluted coffee.
>> then you look at the ingredients list and it's like
>> - Water - Sugar - Vitamin B - Caffeine
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.
Red Bull is a triumph of marketing over... well, everything else. It's not just, from TFA:
For more than a decade, Red Bull paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for university professors to conduct research that has been favorable to the energy drink industry
The reason why drinks mixing caffeine and alcohol have often been banned is that, in studies not funded by Red Bull, there's a clear connection between that and higher car accident and sexual assault rates.
Seems like a good a place as any to ask this - anyone else feel no effect from either coffee or energy drinks? I can go from 4-5 cups of coffee per day at work (coffee machine) to 0 cups in the weekend and feel no different.
Had bouts of doing 4-6 red bulls (or similar energy drinks) per evening into the wee hours as a youngster and still fell asleep at the keyboard - felt no different than drinking water or lemonade.
Maybe related, I ran for an hour a day for a year but never came close to feeling anything like a "runner's high".
Anyone else have similar experiences?
Opposition to energy drinks seems like a moral panic to me. Like I don't see anyone calling for bans on coffee and Irish coffee.
there seems to be 3 different issues in this article:
- 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.
I never again want to work on a team full of people who drink a lot of energy drinks.
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.
Not sure how things work on the backend but we're missing "alcohol" or "vodka" in the headline on HN, as it is on the page.
That's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage.
Does this also apply to the non-alcoholic sparkling apple/grape/pear/...-juices mixed with vodka?
Vodka-Kidibul in Belgium is quite nice.
I don't know the brands in other parts of the world, but I see references to Welch in US...
When I look at the diving pictures, I don't think I ever dived from that height, for locations that were'nt regularly used for diving, this entails risk on its own.
Sometimes you see a bridge over a steep mini canyon and people diving.
If shortly before you dive, you see people diving (even if you never dived there before) it is much safer to dive there than if you don't see people diving, even if you have personally dived there before:
conditions under the water can change, submerged objects may have been thrown in locally, or rolled over a river bed from a different location, and if conditions under the water didn't change, the water level can simply lower and present new danger that way.
regardless of energy drinks, alcohol can obviously cloud your safety judgment.
When I see headlines and stories like this, a male voice with a Mid-Atlantic accent pipes up in my head: "9 out of 10 doctors recommend Pall Mall cigarettes - they help guard against throat scratch!"
>A considerable body of research suggests that incidents like these aren’t just chance or circumstance. Mixing alcohol and energy drinks was linked to higher rates of binge drinking, sexual abuse and drunk driving, according to a study conducted among U.S. college students.
This sounds like it could be correlation? People who are more prone to risk-taking are more likely to mix caffeine and alcohol? Although, in that case, they could be considered a vulnerable population, which a ban would serve to protect. So I guess it makes sense either way.
"The coroner wrote that Mitchell had drowned, likely due to an arrhythmia triggered by the combination of energy drinks and physical exercise. She noted that he had a blood-alcohol content of about 0.1%, slightly over the legal limit for driving."
That's a lot of alcohol. Where I live they'll for sure tear your license and sentence you to up to two years if you're caught behind the wheel at that level of intoxication.
As for so called energy drinks and alcohol, I'd bet taurine is much more important than caffeine.
Everyone knows caffeine isn't that great for you, its already labeled and its not deceiving anyone and many abstain. What they should ban is Gatorade/Poweraid which is tricking everyone. Ask a nephrologist or cardiologist if they drink it! THE THIRST MUTILATOR!!!!!!!!!!!!
A strong indication of addiction is mental backflips to avoid discussing the problem.
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.
I believe soda drinks are a big contributor to various cancers. Stop drinking it. It only gives advantages. There is zero absolutely zero positive thing about these extreme sugar drinks.
I had a night out once and drank far, far too many vodka redbulls, felt awful for days afterwards, since then, just a wiff of an energy drink makes me feel nauseous.
Why are cold drinks with sugar and caffeine seen as problematic, while hot drinks with sugar and caffeine are seen as perfectly good?
anyone in the thread old enough to remember when we trusted the tobacco industry to run its own studies on the safety of tobacco which found that tobacco was definitely safe, then later found that no one knows whether tobacco is safe or not so we can't regulate it until we're sure, then eventually found that the whole time everyone knew it was dangerous?
I visited Finland about 20 years ago and Red Bull was illegal there, though I believe they've since allowed it.
GEE GOLLY.
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.
Feels like common sense to avoid energy drinks.
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.
It's not like health food research is the bastion of good practice, or even okayish practice.
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.
Until real legal consequences like manslaughter charges are applied to liars who prostitute themselves to power, people will die for elite profits.
> In England, an 18-year-old woman suffered three cardiac arrests after downing 10 Jägerbombs
I wonder if there was a pre-existing condition. And... three ???
She's fine now. Dancin on TikTok like everyone else
To all RB/Energy Drink consuments ... why do you drink RB instead of a good ol cup of coffee/tee?
Please ... don't just write "it tastes good" ... no it don't. A strawberry or a cherry from the tree tastes good but not RB.