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.
I have a delayed sleep phase. In the modern working world that means I am not as effective as I could be, and it puts a lot of stress on my body to be awake when work requires.
The stigma is real, no one truly believes it, especially those who love work. But I don't choose it, I would rather be a morning person so it wasn't such a grind to deal with the trivial office bullshit surrounding start times.
Appreciate that some people may have suggestions on how to change and become a morning person. I'll ask this, with your job, your family and other responsibilities in mind, could become a night owl?
Not sure why you’re downvoted, this is HUGE. Most humans have a circadian rhythm that tends toward slightly longer than 24 hours, and waking up at the same time every day can be very difficult for some percentage of us.
That's if they are in a cave experiment: without that the sunlight cycle regulates it back to 24hr. But not for everyone, and that's N24/non-24, not DPSD, delayed-phase sleep disorder.
Sleep problems due to undiagnosed or subtle Sleep Disordered Breathing, or other fatigue-causing conditions not quite bad enough to either be disabling or diagnosed are extremely common.
It's easy to be tempted to blame it on people getting addicted to caffeine or whatever but the reality is that most people do those things to self medicate a real issue they have no better recourse against.
That turned out to be my case. I had at the time undiagnosed sleep apnea, and I think I was using caffeine as a crutch instead of treating the problem.
If you have a recent sleep apnea diagnosis, get your testosterone checked too. Years of poor sleep will crater your levels and CPAP will not help as much as it should.
It’s not just caffeine withdrawal, they’re also in withdrawal from reversible MAO inhibitors present in all coffee brews. Caffeine is a large part of it, but it’s the MAOIs which make the concoction strongly habit-forming.
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.
Everybody's physiology is different, but I drank a full pot of coffee every day, for about 15 years.
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.
Seems like this would have been much easier if you used plain old caffeine pills at the denominations you wanted to work thru, easier to measure (split the tablets) and also removes the other pleasurable aspects like flavor of the coffee and pleasing aromas—those kind of subjective cues that compound the preference and addiction
Isnt what you're doing now basically—what it would be called for almost any other drug—"kindling" or something?
Tapering down using
Caffeine pills (nodōz) has been really effective for me multiple times in the past.
I have found it tricky to find a good starting dose, and it gets a bit difficult to break tablets into very small amounts (1/10th pill) tapering down near the end. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417034
I would never try cold turkey again due to nasty headaches.
I've done it linearly over some weeks, but if anyone has tried non-linear tapering I would be interested to know what worked for you.
You can get powder and a digital scale, and there are relatively low caffeine pills. Alternatively, things like dark chocolate might be easier to cut to small doses.
For about 8 years now I've been down to one caffeinated coffee per day, first thing in the morning. If I miss it, I have the start of a migraine by about 1pm. It's mad.
I started drinking one small but dense cup of coffee every work day just after lunch to avoid being sleepy after the meal two years ago, and this year I noticed that I wasn't feeling good during the weekend, then I noticed that if I drank a coffee after lunch I'd be normal. Skip forward a few months, I notice now that if for some reason I forget to drink my coffee after lunch I wake up the next day with a migraine, each time.
I like the ritual of grinding my fresh grains and brewing my cup, but I think I'll move to decaf and a quick nap like I was doing before. The migraine is the proof of an addiction.
I had to avoid caffeine for some time due to medical issues. I really missed the morning ritual of waking up slowly with a cup of coffee, so I replaced it with decaf coffee which satisfies the ritual part of my morning at least. Definitely a 'YMMV' thing and it wouldn't solve the headaches of course, but it at least makes the morning a bit nicer.
Hopefully you were using very specific decaf for which you knew the values. Decaf coffee beans in the US vary from nearly zero to 30 or 40% of regular. Various sites and articles claim that there's a legal requirement for 97% removal in the US, but others call that out as coffee myth.
That was the only OTC I avoided, specifically because I was trying to tightly control and titrate down the caffeine dose (granted, measuring beans isn't precise dosing, but I didn't want to blow my work out of the water by throwing some Excedrin into the mix).
I don't get migraines very often (once a year maybe), but the first aura was very strange not knowing what it was.
For me they start out as a bright point of light then spreads out into an expanding shimmering arc of rainbow colors. Sometimes the vision inside the arc is ok, other times it is kinda missing. The headache usually comes on as the aura is fading out. Sometimes I get an aura without the migraine.
I get a blind spot near the center of my vision that looks a bit like what you see when you rub your closed eyes. It gets large enough to mostly obscure faces and prevent reading
Yeah, double (and I realize now my original statement wasn’t clear: that’s an occasional espresso in addition to my daily single cup of coffee in the morning).
I quit cold turkey and consumed around 1200mg/day, not by drinking energy drinks but coffee, 6 strong cups of filter or more. I made sure to also quit caffeinated sort drinks and switched to herbal tea.
The immediate withdrawal symptoms started after around 24h and consisted of headache, cold sweats and brain fog that lasted around three days and seriously impeded my ability to work. However, the psychological craving just... never really got better once it plateaued. I always felt a bit more understimulated than before I stopped, and a bit less motivated.
I kept it up for about 1.5 years or so before I decided it wasn't worth it. The first cup of coffee seriously gave me euphoria comparable to a low dose of amphetamine. That was so pleasurable that I tried to keep my consumption to one cup per week, but even with that spacing I felt the tolerance build up again.
I ended up brewing just one cup of filter in the morning, then drinking one more cup when I arrive at the office. I have a rule to stop before 9am which I found is the latest I can do caffeine without disrupting my sleep. I think I am one of the slow metabolizers.
My goal wasn't to completely quit. The goal was to keep my caffeine intake less than or equal to 400mg (the FDA's recommended max) and to cut it off at 2pm. I didn't cold-turkey cut off caffeine.
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.
>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.
that's for one shot of espresso, and most standard regularly-sized espresso drinks are served with two shots, so that's closer to 100-130 mg of caffeine
i've experimented with reducing caffeine and it's overall been a great experiment. but also i take a stimulant for adhd so you could imagine it's easy for me to overdose on caffeine while i already have other uppers in my system. when medicated, a coke zero is basically the perfect amount of caffeine for me if i need a pep without becoming a nervous wreck
I dunno. Caffeine doesn't affect me very much (I mean to say, I can drink regular coffee and go to sleep an hour later without difficulty), though it is somewhat pleasant. I used to regularly detox from caffeine to get that initial rush again, and that would mean 3-4 days of mild headache, and another few days of fuzzy-headedness, and then things were normal again. I'm aware, though, that some people can't have coffee or cola after early afternoon if they want to sleep well, so. Various people have quite different responsiveness to caffeine.
Right now I think 800 mg/d of caffeine would send me to the ER lol. Discontinuing 800mg/d steady state, cold turkey... that would mean 3 weeks of migraine-like headaches
I couldn't even get away from 2 cups/day until i started hyperbolic tapering by slowly mixing decaf into my regular beans.
If I consume 1-2 canned coffees a day (which is around 300mg at most), it takes me around 7 days after I quit to stop getting headaches, body aches, or mood issues.
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.
dude, don't even get me started on those bang energy drinks. I don't know what they put in them but monsters do not make me run to the bathroom like those things do. it might be a caffeine threshold thing I don't know. monsters have about 180 mg of caffeine bang drinks have I think 300 mg.
the bang drinks even used to have creatine in them which would actually make you sick if you didn't have anything to eat around the time you drank it. they have reformulated. so wouldn't it surprise me if the bang people were putting some weird stuff in there that was basically acting as a laxative. I have no idea.
yeah that's absolutely a strong possibility and I thought about that. though I've noticed it doesn't happen with monsters and it happens every single time with bang energy drinks. to the point that they were very useful for getting regular again. strongly possible that monsters and bang use different artificial sweeteners. I'll see if I have a can laying around. maybe that in combination with the caffeine it's kind of like a train running downhill right out the butt.
pounding 300 mg of caffeine a can tho... as a 10+ year recovering veteran of the ephedrine caffeine stack, it's territory I don't ever want to get into again.
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.)
Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?
Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me. 'It seems you have trouble regulating intake of a weak stimulant most people have little issue with, how about you take one of the strong, seriously treacherous ones instead?'
> Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?
I'm not advocating for substituting pseudoephedrine for caffeine, but rather using pseudoephedrine as a one time proxy for amphetamine to see how well it works for you.
> Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me.
With respect for the potential for abuse and addiction, that's a good point. My suggestion comes from a firsthand account of an adult with undiagnosed ADHD who self medicated with grossly excessive coffee drinking. Their doctor suggested getting assessed for ADHD and making the substitution out of fear for their cardiovascular health.
I assumed the parent commenter was overusing caffeine to self medicate for attention issues, but didn't think of the possibility that it was pure addictive behavior.
Amphetamine is no stronger or more treacherous than caffeine, when dosed properly. As someone with EXTENSIVE experience with both, I would say caffeine is probably substantially more treacherous.
> Consuming that much caffeine is terrible for your heart.
He's talking about 800mg, and I doubt it. 400mg is well known to be a safe daily level. I doubt by doubling it you will experience massive negative side effects.
Here in Finland (possibly highest caffeine consumption per capita in the world?) there are people who have been drinking well over >1000mg/day for decades and life expectancy and heart health among the population is normal.
I agree it's not good for my heart. I keep my caffeine intake considerably lower now, always less than the 400mg max that the FDA recommends, usually less than that.
I'm not sure that adderrall is significantly healthier for the heart. I did take it for a bit but I found adderral to be unbelievably terrible. I would take a small dose at like 7am, and I still would have trouble getting to sleep at night, and when I did get sleep it didn't feel terribly restful. I was only on it for about a week and that was enough.
Obviously if it works for you, don't let me take that away from you.
> I would take a small dose at like 7am, and I still would have trouble getting to sleep at night
Was this an extended release verson like Vyvanse? I had an absolutely terrible time with that for the same reasons. If that was your experience with plain dextroamphetamine, totally sounds like it's just not meant for you!
I tried the three big ones: regular Adderall, Adderall extended release, and Vyvance. None of them really helped my focus and all three really screwed with my sleep.
Kind of ironically, it turned out that a lot of my focus issues were due to (at the time) undiagnosed sleep apnea. The caffeine and the adderall sort of became band-aids that covered up the real problems.
Good Lord no. Sudafed is nothing like Adderall and Adderall is nothing like caffeine, for starters.
I was on a low 10mg time release dose of Adderall for about 6 years. I had a lapse of insurance and could no longer afford it. I weaned myself off over a month and the withdrawals were absolutely fucking terrible.
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.
As long as its a rinse thats fine, you shouldn't brush your teeth immediately after.
You probably don't have to do anything special, your saliva is surprising effective at repairing trivial damage from minor acids as long as you give it time. Pounding acid after acid all day long is how you get in trouble.
Also, an effective drink after soda is unsweetened tea! The tea plant is extremely efficient at extracting fluoride from the ground and tea always has fluoride. Thats why consuming gallons of cheap tea can give you floridosis!
I've been drinking loads of coke Zero (up to 3 liters a day, these days it's about 2 liters), and my teeth are fine. I'm 40 and have been drinking it for most of my life, it started when I was about 16, with regular coke back then. Maybe I'm lucky.
I'm regularly afraid of things like that, not only for drinking too much coke but also for not having exactly the healthiest lifestyle overall. I've tried reducing coke a few times with some luck here and there, but eventually got back to it everytime. For now, my annual checkups are good.
As a coffee drinker the "bizarrely addictive" comment does not resonate with me at all.
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.
I don't particularly like coffee, so it's not addictive for me as well. But neither are the energy drinks that I actually like. Conversely, there are people heavily addicted to coffee, whether you want to call that "bizzarely" or not.
So, we can haggle over details, but overall I don't see a dramatic qualitative difference.
Coffee is also slightly diuretic, so it's not a "drink to quench your thirst" drink, at least not to me. Water (plain or fizzy/flavored), milk, diet sodas, etc. fill that niche.
Probably. As I said, I've always hated coffee so I've never really had any desire to consume large quantities of it, so I can't speak to that.
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.
Drip coffee has ~40-50% more caffeine per 8oz serving than Red Bull (about 90-100mg vs 65mg). The nice thing about coffee is that the mouth-puckering tannins make it harder to absolutely pound them, like one can do easily with cans of Red Bull.
Yeah, the real problem with Red Bull is that it's caffeine-spiked Gatorade. So you're drinking to satisfy cravings but also just because you're thirsty.
Sugar free/low sugar energy drinks are really common, and most coffee drinkers I know are mixing in sugar or creamer or something in their coffee, so I don't think they're that different. Personally, as someone who is super sensitive to bitterness, coffee has never worked for me, so if I need a caffeine boost, I go for a sugar free Red Bull or a white Monster
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.
> 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'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...
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.
I think the most convincing example isn't energy drinks but rather Panara bread's energy blaster drinks that they had to stop selling. [1] It seems like they used all the same ingredients common to a lot of energy drinks, but they used more of them.
The caffeinated lemonade was amazing, but I have a very high caffeine tolerance (1000mg+ a day) and it made me jittery. Can’t imagine what effect it had on people without a serious tolerance.
That lemonade was stupidly high, 390mg caffeine. Only serious addicts could drink that without noticing strong effects.
What’s most remarkable about that case, is that it was a Panera. Could have added 50mg and it would still be more caffeinated than I would expect of the establishment. There was no need to go to the extreme end.
Even the strongest energy drink I've ever seen sold retail in the US had "only" 300mg of caffeine. And it came with plenty of signage on the packaging, indicating very prominently how high the caffeine levels were. I usually drink 200mg a day total (sometimes, but rarely, crossing into the 300mg territory), and you were totally correct, there is absolutely no way to not notice when that 300mg comes from a single drink.
In no world would I expect a random caffeinated drink at Panera to go above that.
>consumed an equivalent of 10 energy drinks+10 shots of hard liquor
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)
Fair point, but yeah, it is still quite a crazy amount, esp in terms of alcohol, even for someone like me. And I am saying this as someone with very strong alcohol tolerance, not as a (likely) smaller 18 year old woman with way less tolerance.
I expected to take the train back home at 9. Instead I regained consciousness at five in the morning. Except I was already fully awake, when I "woke up", walking back to town. My body was just on autopilot. For 9 hours straight.
I found that very peculiar, and subsequently moderated my alcohol intake.
A friendly stranger sent my wallet back a few days later.
And doing "only alcohol" vs "alcohol plus energy drink" research is quite misleading: college kids are using it to mask the taste of alcohol, so it is basically a certainty that they'll drink more alcohol and drink it faster. And because alcohol is bad that will obviously lead to worse outcomes.
If you want to do proper research on the impact of the caffeine part you'd have to do, say, "alcohol with Red Bull" vs "alcohol with Sprite".
There seem to be heart issues involved in most of the energy drink related deaths. More specifically, people finding out they had heart issues, by dying.
So "those people just shouldn't drink caffeine then" would be the standard advice, except that some people apparently die before they realize that they're in that category. (It seems to be mostly young people? My country recently banned energy drinks for people under 18, they now check your age at the supermarket if you try to buy them.)
The strange thing is, if it's caused by caffeine, we'd also be hearing about people dying from having too many coffees, but you never hear about that. Maybe it's some of the other ingredients (taurine, guarana) or the combination?
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.
This comment feels like reading a forum in the mid-2000s, haha.
The Rip It people are usually vets - Rip Its were the only ones you could get reliably while deployed in the ME.
I don't know anyone who actually drinks Bawls - most of my gamer and IT friends do Monster Zero and Monster Ultra. You can get them basically everywhere and the fruity ones actually taste pretty good.
LAN parties haven't really been a huge thing in a long time, sadly, outside of convention-style events.
Cherry AMP was great until they started putting sucralose in it. It was close to how Mtn Dew Game Fuel used to taste before they... started putting sucralose in that.
I think at this point the zero cal/low cal ones are more popular. I don't know anyone who drinks Black Monster, while White Monster (zero cal) is so popular it's literally a meme. You go to a store and most of the shelf space is the low cal/zero cal options.
And how much of that is milk, honey, or just water from making weak coffee?
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.
I make it strong. No sweeteners. An ounce or two of heavy cream. The amount of caffeine is probably quite high.
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.
Anyway, here are published numbers we can find for reasonable comparison:
Monster Energy 16oz cans
Original Green Monster: 160 mg
Monster Ultra / Zero Sugar: 150 mg
Monster Lo-Carb: 140 mg
Starbucks Brewed coffee
Pike Place Roast: Short 155 mg, Tall 235 mg, Grande 310 mg, Venti 410 mg.
Blonde Roast: Short 180 mg, Tall 270 mg, Grande 360 mg, Venti 475 mg.
Dark Roast: Short 130 mg, Tall 195 mg, Grande 260 mg, Venti 340 mg.
Decaf Pike Place: Short 15 mg, Tall 20 mg, Grande 25 mg, Venti 30 mg.
Starbucks espresso is 150 mg per standard double shot, so e.g. a grande caramel macchiato is 150 mg for 16oz of liquid, just like the monster energy drink can.
(In case you don't know, Grande, aka 16oz, is the most popular drink size at Starbucks, and short isn't even shown visibly on the menu.)
No reason to flip out just because you demonstrated your assumption was incorrect. Don’t worry we won’t test if you actually drink strong coffee.
> this person
You can find random YouTube videos supporting anything. The YouTube algorithm specifically promotes wildly inaccurate results as they are more interesting.
They don’t publish numbers for liability reasons as they can’t guarantee consistency across all stores, but finding the average isn’t difficult for them. Similarly people who are willing to sample across large geographic areas can find meaningful averages.
> most popular size
Most popular and representative are very different. You’re skipping a lot of their offerings. People can go from around 40mg of caffeine at Starbucks all well past 300, but 1-3 monster energy drinks per day starts high and skyrockets from there. Some days you want just a little more kick, and more granular options is a significant benefit.
Ok, I won't worry. But only because you said not to.
> compiled them from McDonald's customer service
It sounds like you didn't actually click through and read their source, because that's not where their source says the numbers actually come from. I'll leave finding the answer as a fun exercise. (Hint: the numbers have no relation to any McDonalds products except by USDA category)
> They don’t publish numbers for liability reasons
That's a funny thing you just made up for no reason. It's so strange that other major retailers publish numbers then, but I guess Starbucks is probably too small of a legal target to worry about such things.
Anyway, McDonald's statement on why they don't publish numbers, per my previous comment, is because they aren't required to, which is true.
Effectively all nutrition labels are just using the FDA’s numbers on their ingredients list. They know how many coffee beans they buy and how many cups they serve. Brewing coffee isn’t going to summon arbitrary amounts of caffeine from the neatherworld.
> just made up
Actually it’s from an internal source though possibly outdated. McDonald’s is rather famous for losing a large lawsuit around coffee. They didn’t just change the temperature and call it a day but went full cya.
>> 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.
I was exaggerating a bit, but afaik none of the ingredients in that list are any kind of mysterious harmful ingredient specific to energy drinks. That's all pretty normal soft drink stuff, plus the carnitine and tartrate which are not very exotic supplements.
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
it goes back well before that. It comes in a small can so it must be more potent than everyone else's sugary fizz, it costs more than everyone else's sugary fizz so it must be better, it tastes like ass so there must be some health or energy benefit to it, and taurine is about to be banned because it's so... so... well something, so get it now. Its success has been the subject of numerous studies by psychologists and behavioral economists.
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.
A can of Monster is actually closer to two typical cups of coffee (usually a bit under 100mg vs 160mg). Though that doesn't change the point being made; nobody would blink at "I drink two cups of coffee most mornings". The various B vitamins also help avoid the jitters that caffeine can cause.
ingredients aside, coffee tastes somewhat natural whereas most energy drinks taste like liquid sweet tarts. I have never had one and felt remotely like it might be healthy.
You are also cutting out preservatives, additives, sucralose, dyes and whatever else is in the long ingredient list.
I would say that's a very sugarcoated version of the Monster energy drink ingredients list[1]. The real list is ten time longer than the ingredients list of a cup of black filter coffee. And one of the items is "natural flavors", which could be hiding a long list of things all by itself.
It depends on the drink, but there's often a lot more than those ingredients. The caffeine, while the same as what's in coffee per ml, you are looking at 600ml at a minimum for most of these drinks meaning you 2 cups of coffee for every serving.
Whenever I stumble upon articles such as this one, I always just mentally swap the words energy drink with "two coffees and a multivitamin" (or even "one coffee and a multivitamin" if we're talking about a Red Bull) and then the whole article just seems silly.
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".
I have ADHD and noticed an INVERSE effect of caffeine for years, it would mostly just make me tired. That was before being properly medicated with a stimulant. After that, caffeine works the same as anyone else. It’s very weird.
In the internet age, I’ve learned this is pretty common for people with adhd.
I have 6 or so years experience with serious running, and experienced a runners high exactly 1 time.
It's likely due to some other factor or individual difference. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that stimulants affect people with ADHD any differently than people without ADHD. By differently, I mean having a paradoxical reaction that can only be attributed to having ADHD.
Correlation does not imply causation, but people still try it all the time.
How come normal people take methamphetamine and go crazy but people with ADHD can take it to feel normal? (One of the less common prescription meds for ADHD is literally just meth but with the government stamp of approval on it)
I'm a psychiatry resident, and I have ADHD. The myth is, in fact, a myth.
More importantly, the dose of desoxyn (methamphetamine) used therapeutically for ADHD is *much* lower than what's consumed recreationally. That's really it. Use low doses, as prescribed, and the risks are minimal/comparable to most alternative stimulants.
It's like asking why a society where everyone has cups of tea twice a day has a different relationship to caffeine than a frat house where they're drinking 3 cans of Red Bull a night.
If anyone is curious, a medical daily dose can be around 20mg and recreational consumption for a non-hardcore user is around 400mg so they’re commonly taking 20x the therapeutic dose
I must be strange because I feel no effect from coffee until I drink too much which is when my heart beats too fast for too long and I feel anxious
Energy drinks on the other hand ? The taste sucks but they do work and give me what I guess most people get from coffee ? They make me sharp and pumped up
Do you mean the combination with caffeine or just the sugar? Cause I've had very sweet stuff before and it is definitely not producing the same effects
I'd get runner's high sometimes. If you got it, you'd know it. Personally, I only recall it happening for me at end of treadmill and erg and dumbbells session, not on any of the many runs on streets/waterfront/tracks.
The afterglow isn't confused with feeling good about completing exercise, or accomplishment/confidence. Example of confidence: when on a track, I'd run until I felt like I was out of steam, then sprint the last half-lap, just to know I could do that. (Don't try this if your heart isn't currently conditioned for it.)
I've given up caffeine, and hardly ever miss it.
One problem is caffeine for me seems to shift energy around, not create it. It might make me more energetic right now, but then headachey and ugh later. Also creates a dependence: "I feel like crap; I must need more caffeine".
Can also interfere with sleep many hours later, and sleep is super-important. It upsets GI a bit. And personally it seems to magnify some emotions, and, when caffeinated, I will somehow always find a cause of something that needs someone to fight for it (it's uncanny).
I care enough without chemically boosting things. And I'm fortunate to naturally be energetic and sharp without caffeine.
I don't drink even decaf anymore, because it still has too much.
IIRC, detoxing from caffeeine cold-turkey takes a couple weeks. Or zero-caffeine herbal/fruit teas can help with the warm mug of hot liquids ritual substitute. And exercise, hydration, nutrition, and good sleep.
Same. I've been told I'm a "high metabolizer". I can drink a cup of coffee/tea/soda before bed and pass out. No noticable effect.
It's weird that you mention the runner's high, too. I've run 6 miles 3x a week for months on end (PR of 8.5 miles), and I have no idea what other runners are talking about. I've never put the two together before.
The runner's high I've experienced comes after completing a long, hard race and finally getting to rest after pushing myself beyond what training was like.
I could believe the UK might try to ban selling coffee to under 21s too at the current rate, honestly. There's probably at least one study about stunting growth with coffee?
I mean, there's more than enough reasons to criticise or laugh at the UK that actually exist, without mocking a country for a hypothetical of someone online that hasn't actually been proposed by any politicians or, well, anybody at all?
It is incredibly annoying at the self-checkout being asked to present PHOTO ID to buy a monster energy. I was once denied my beverage, so I walked back over to the meal deal area and purchased a Starbucks canned coffee that had THE SAME LEVEL OF CAFFIENE
You're making the mistake of assuming it has something to do with the caffeine content or caffeine being illegal.
There's one pattern that all these rules have in common: Someone noticed a problem, so they added friction to try and reduce the problem. People are getting fucked up on Red Bull? Add friction to buying a Red Bull. People aren't getting fucked up on coffee? Then don't add friction to coffee. I know us engineer personalities would like to define uniform rules for all caffeinated products or not define any rules, and that's what you should do if you are making a medical robot to maintain someone's caffeine level, but that isn't really how the social world works. It's a quite straightforward loop of observation->response.
Starbucks and Black Rifle both sell coffee in cans right next to the energy drinks now. I haven't personally seen any high-caffeine products marketed to kids personally though.
Anything with any sort of flavor is argued as being sold to children these days. Except bubblegum flavored vodka I guess. Somehow that has always gotten the pass while people handwring over juul pods.
I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say - at least here I don't see marketing campaigns for flavored vodka targeting children, and unlike energy drinks it's not on store shelves right next to soft drinks.
I never saw those sorts of ads for juul either. People just incorrectly assumed fruity must be for kids and that no adults would want say a mango pod vs pure tobacco flavor. At the gas station that vodka is in the common shelving as its often the 40 proof stuff like orlov with these flavors. The smirnoff in the grocery store depending on the state could be in the same aisle as the soda.
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.
My understanding is that part of the problem with mixing caffine with alcohol is that it can prevent someone from passing out; which is the body's defense mechanism against alcohol poisoning.
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.
Four Loko had to take the caffeine out across the US years ago. Now it’s just 8 standard drinks in a tall boy for $4 - still very much a problem but no caffeine.
Vodka Red Bull always seemed crazy to me. Caffeine lasts like 6 hours so I drink one at 2 am, what the hell am I doing! Granted people do cocaine so maybe it’s inconsequential.
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.
There is actually quite a lot of variation from person to person in caffeine elimination half-life, from about 1.5-9 hours. Some of my extended family could drink a cup of coffee right before bed without issue.
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.
There certainly is kind of a different culture around people who chug energy drinks compared to people who drink coffee.
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 think there's a certain type that you're talking about that does tend towards energy drinks like that, but it's not true in the other direction, as that type is a minority of energy drink drinkers. Just a particularly noticeable one.
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.
Sure, I guess I've just worked at enough startups that advertise "keeping the fridge full of Red Bull" as some kind of perk, when in reality it kind of ends up being a code for "you'd better enjoy working long, long hours".
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.
>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.
People don't say to themselves "today I want caffeine and alcohol" and then search for products matching their preferred mix ratio. They just see a product meant to get them fucked up, and consume it. The selection of easily available products absolutely matters.
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!"
"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.
On the other, ‘energy’ drinks can often have far more sugar and caffeine than e.g. tea or coffee, and are obviously marketed heavily at young people, who can then find themselves consuming unhealthy amounts and/or forming addictions.
So it’s not really a particular drink in moderation that’s a problem per se, but everything else that comes with it.
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.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
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.
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?
The problem with rational decisionmaking is there are vast areas where only irrational opinions are acceptable. Try the same line of logical reasoning for vaccines, low fat high carb diets, statins, uncontrolled immigration, various economic policies, and let us know how long until you get wrongthink attacks. There are vast irrational areas of discussion where even the faintest hint of rationality is double plus ungood.
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.
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.
What health effects compared to other caffeine sources (pills, coffee)
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 is just a moral panic because college students like to drink vodka Red Bulls, as opposed to drinking Irish coffees or any similar combination of caffeine and alcohol.
Nah, no moral panic here. I don't see the reason to combine stimulants with depressants, you then just mask the underlying issues with both. Hence often the regulation of the combination.
Sure. Realistically you simply regulate them. Espresso martinis are already long a popular 'after dinner' cocktail with the assumption that you'll be buzzed from the caffeine and able to drive better.
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).
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.
People can make up their own minds as to whether they are willing to take the risks, but first they must be given accurate information. It is important to know if the studies that say something is safe has been funded by the industries that profit from it.
Say it louder for the folks in the back!
I drink monsters on ocasion, there was a time I was drinking one a day.
And it was exclusivelly people who couldn't go without multiple cups of coffe a day telling me how it's so much worse and how bad its going to be.
Yes I am aware energy drinks are not the healthiest choice of drink. But you could say the same for anything that isn't water or naturally blended juice. Besides everything is bad in excess.
But it's my body, I get to choose what and how much of it I consume!
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.
Speak for yourself, I love the taste of taurine. Plus there's something strangely satisfying about the taste of a standard diet Red Bull. There's no attempt at natural flavoring there: you can rightly tell God had no part in making it.
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 use on-the-go packets of energy drink powder that I drop into a small plastic bag when I travel. This allows me to have access to tasty caffeine anywhere I have water because I bring a bottle. Coffee does not offer the convenience or portability that energy drinks do.
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.
You can't ask someone why they like something more while just denying the most common, subjective reason. I don't like coffee because in my opinion it does not taste good. A peach red bull tastes just better in my opinion. Also, two things can taste good for a person at the same time. I like my energy drink which is easily accessible in my fridge but when I am out and a bout a fresh strawberry, banana or any other fresh fruit is of course better.
I asked a coworker who gave a few reasons. It's easier/cheaper to buy in bulk. He gets them by the case. He also like sweet flavors more than bitter flavors.
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.
red bull doesn't taste great personally but most flavors of monster actually do to me. and they're less bitter than coffee and carbonated, which is nice.
I wonder why the flavoring would be different? Also zero or the full fat versions, because maybe it's different types of artificial sweeteners involved?
A lot of food and beverages are tweaked to suit the local market. I find monster mango in the UK to actually taste like real mango but the one in the USA tastes like chemicals which I think is less tolerable
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.
That is likely true, but there are other factors. For example delayed sleep phase paired with fixed office work hours.
I bet many people that have a slight 1-2h shift compared to the average are using an early morning coffee to make things work.
I have a delayed sleep phase. In the modern working world that means I am not as effective as I could be, and it puts a lot of stress on my body to be awake when work requires.
The stigma is real, no one truly believes it, especially those who love work. But I don't choose it, I would rather be a morning person so it wasn't such a grind to deal with the trivial office bullshit surrounding start times.
Appreciate that some people may have suggestions on how to change and become a morning person. I'll ask this, with your job, your family and other responsibilities in mind, could become a night owl?
Not sure why you’re downvoted, this is HUGE. Most humans have a circadian rhythm that tends toward slightly longer than 24 hours, and waking up at the same time every day can be very difficult for some percentage of us.
That's if they are in a cave experiment: without that the sunlight cycle regulates it back to 24hr. But not for everyone, and that's N24/non-24, not DPSD, delayed-phase sleep disorder.
Not everyone lives in a place with relatively consistent sunlight either
If you're far north you have really long days in summer and long nights in winter
Sleep problems due to undiagnosed or subtle Sleep Disordered Breathing, or other fatigue-causing conditions not quite bad enough to either be disabling or diagnosed are extremely common.
It's easy to be tempted to blame it on people getting addicted to caffeine or whatever but the reality is that most people do those things to self medicate a real issue they have no better recourse against.
That turned out to be my case. I had at the time undiagnosed sleep apnea, and I think I was using caffeine as a crutch instead of treating the problem.
If you have a recent sleep apnea diagnosis, get your testosterone checked too. Years of poor sleep will crater your levels and CPAP will not help as much as it should.
It’s not just caffeine withdrawal, they’re also in withdrawal from reversible MAO inhibitors present in all coffee brews. Caffeine is a large part of it, but it’s the MAOIs which make the concoction strongly habit-forming.
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.
Everybody's physiology is different, but I drank a full pot of coffee every day, for about 15 years.
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.
Seems like this would have been much easier if you used plain old caffeine pills at the denominations you wanted to work thru, easier to measure (split the tablets) and also removes the other pleasurable aspects like flavor of the coffee and pleasing aromas—those kind of subjective cues that compound the preference and addiction
Isnt what you're doing now basically—what it would be called for almost any other drug—"kindling" or something?
Tapering down using Caffeine pills (nodōz) has been really effective for me multiple times in the past.
I have found it tricky to find a good starting dose, and it gets a bit difficult to break tablets into very small amounts (1/10th pill) tapering down near the end. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417034
I would never try cold turkey again due to nasty headaches.
I've done it linearly over some weeks, but if anyone has tried non-linear tapering I would be interested to know what worked for you.
You can get powder and a digital scale, and there are relatively low caffeine pills. Alternatively, things like dark chocolate might be easier to cut to small doses.
Good idea. I didn't know about caffeine powder suppliments (for sports). Scales and gel-caps are something else I wouldn't think of without context.
You can dissolve a known amount of caffeine into a known amount of liquid, and then partition the liquid.
Caffeine dosage is strange, because a fraction of the regular dose can remove withdrawal symptoms.
Possible, yeah. I still wanted to drink coffee, though - decaf. I enjoy it. So, went the long route.
For about 8 years now I've been down to one caffeinated coffee per day, first thing in the morning. If I miss it, I have the start of a migraine by about 1pm. It's mad.
Yes completely!
I started drinking one small but dense cup of coffee every work day just after lunch to avoid being sleepy after the meal two years ago, and this year I noticed that I wasn't feeling good during the weekend, then I noticed that if I drank a coffee after lunch I'd be normal. Skip forward a few months, I notice now that if for some reason I forget to drink my coffee after lunch I wake up the next day with a migraine, each time.
I like the ritual of grinding my fresh grains and brewing my cup, but I think I'll move to decaf and a quick nap like I was doing before. The migraine is the proof of an addiction.
I had to avoid caffeine for some time due to medical issues. I really missed the morning ritual of waking up slowly with a cup of coffee, so I replaced it with decaf coffee which satisfies the ritual part of my morning at least. Definitely a 'YMMV' thing and it wouldn't solve the headaches of course, but it at least makes the morning a bit nicer.
Hopefully you were using very specific decaf for which you knew the values. Decaf coffee beans in the US vary from nearly zero to 30 or 40% of regular. Various sites and articles claim that there's a legal requirement for 97% removal in the US, but others call that out as coffee myth.
Did you try Excedrin? It has some caffeine in it.
It does seem to be especially helpful relative to just Tylenol for me as a migraine sufferer. Specifically for helping to disperse the aura.
That was the only OTC I avoided, specifically because I was trying to tightly control and titrate down the caffeine dose (granted, measuring beans isn't precise dosing, but I didn't want to blow my work out of the water by throwing some Excedrin into the mix).
> disperse the aura.
What’s this mean?
Migraine auras - the additional disturbances that can accompany the pain (or, in some cases be present without the pain) [0].
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22131-migrain...
Thank you!
I don't get migraines very often (once a year maybe), but the first aura was very strange not knowing what it was.
For me they start out as a bright point of light then spreads out into an expanding shimmering arc of rainbow colors. Sometimes the vision inside the arc is ok, other times it is kinda missing. The headache usually comes on as the aura is fading out. Sometimes I get an aura without the migraine.
Visual disturbance.
I get a blind spot near the center of my vision that looks a bit like what you see when you rub your closed eyes. It gets large enough to mostly obscure faces and prevent reading
I was going mad for a good chunk of time a while ago figuring out why those blind spots were forming, glad to see I’m not alone
You weaned yourself off caffeine, but dependence on the other psychoactives in coffee still remains.
> now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.
FYI, unless we're talking double espresso, a typical shot of espresso contains less caffeine (up to half) than a typical cup of drip coffee.
Yeah, double (and I realize now my original statement wasn’t clear: that’s an occasional espresso in addition to my daily single cup of coffee in the morning).
I quit cold turkey and consumed around 1200mg/day, not by drinking energy drinks but coffee, 6 strong cups of filter or more. I made sure to also quit caffeinated sort drinks and switched to herbal tea.
The immediate withdrawal symptoms started after around 24h and consisted of headache, cold sweats and brain fog that lasted around three days and seriously impeded my ability to work. However, the psychological craving just... never really got better once it plateaued. I always felt a bit more understimulated than before I stopped, and a bit less motivated.
I kept it up for about 1.5 years or so before I decided it wasn't worth it. The first cup of coffee seriously gave me euphoria comparable to a low dose of amphetamine. That was so pleasurable that I tried to keep my consumption to one cup per week, but even with that spacing I felt the tolerance build up again.
I limited to 1-2 servings of coffee by switching to an aeropress and a hand cranked grinder.
When I brew one big carafe, then I have this compulsion to drink it, like every new task needs a prelude where I get up to refill my mug.
But now there’s too much friction to brew the 2nd or 3rd cup since I know I won’t even feel it.
I ended up brewing just one cup of filter in the morning, then drinking one more cup when I arrive at the office. I have a rule to stop before 9am which I found is the latest I can do caffeine without disrupting my sleep. I think I am one of the slow metabolizers.
My goal wasn't to completely quit. The goal was to keep my caffeine intake less than or equal to 400mg (the FDA's recommended max) and to cut it off at 2pm. I didn't cold-turkey cut off caffeine.
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.
>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.
that's for one shot of espresso, and most standard regularly-sized espresso drinks are served with two shots, so that's closer to 100-130 mg of caffeine
i've experimented with reducing caffeine and it's overall been a great experiment. but also i take a stimulant for adhd so you could imagine it's easy for me to overdose on caffeine while i already have other uppers in my system. when medicated, a coke zero is basically the perfect amount of caffeine for me if i need a pep without becoming a nervous wreck
I dunno. Caffeine doesn't affect me very much (I mean to say, I can drink regular coffee and go to sleep an hour later without difficulty), though it is somewhat pleasant. I used to regularly detox from caffeine to get that initial rush again, and that would mean 3-4 days of mild headache, and another few days of fuzzy-headedness, and then things were normal again. I'm aware, though, that some people can't have coffee or cola after early afternoon if they want to sleep well, so. Various people have quite different responsiveness to caffeine.
Right now I think 800 mg/d of caffeine would send me to the ER lol. Discontinuing 800mg/d steady state, cold turkey... that would mean 3 weeks of migraine-like headaches
I couldn't even get away from 2 cups/day until i started hyperbolic tapering by slowly mixing decaf into my regular beans.
If I consume 1-2 canned coffees a day (which is around 300mg at most), it takes me around 7 days after I quit to stop getting headaches, body aches, or mood issues.
I think the actual threshold is when the withdrawal misery falls below the noise floor of the ambient misery.
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.
dude, don't even get me started on those bang energy drinks. I don't know what they put in them but monsters do not make me run to the bathroom like those things do. it might be a caffeine threshold thing I don't know. monsters have about 180 mg of caffeine bang drinks have I think 300 mg.
the bang drinks even used to have creatine in them which would actually make you sick if you didn't have anything to eat around the time you drank it. they have reformulated. so wouldn't it surprise me if the bang people were putting some weird stuff in there that was basically acting as a laxative. I have no idea.
Sugar alternatives might be the problem, for me sucralose is a countdown to a space launch.
yeah that's absolutely a strong possibility and I thought about that. though I've noticed it doesn't happen with monsters and it happens every single time with bang energy drinks. to the point that they were very useful for getting regular again. strongly possible that monsters and bang use different artificial sweeteners. I'll see if I have a can laying around. maybe that in combination with the caffeine it's kind of like a train running downhill right out the butt.
pounding 300 mg of caffeine a can tho... as a 10+ year recovering veteran of the ephedrine caffeine stack, it's territory I don't ever want to get into again.
Both Bang and Monster contain artificial sweeteners, unlike Red Bull. Maybe that could be what upset your stomach.
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.)
Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?
Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me. 'It seems you have trouble regulating intake of a weak stimulant most people have little issue with, how about you take one of the strong, seriously treacherous ones instead?'
> Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?
I'm not advocating for substituting pseudoephedrine for caffeine, but rather using pseudoephedrine as a one time proxy for amphetamine to see how well it works for you.
> Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me.
With respect for the potential for abuse and addiction, that's a good point. My suggestion comes from a firsthand account of an adult with undiagnosed ADHD who self medicated with grossly excessive coffee drinking. Their doctor suggested getting assessed for ADHD and making the substitution out of fear for their cardiovascular health.
I assumed the parent commenter was overusing caffeine to self medicate for attention issues, but didn't think of the possibility that it was pure addictive behavior.
Amphetamine is no stronger or more treacherous than caffeine, when dosed properly. As someone with EXTENSIVE experience with both, I would say caffeine is probably substantially more treacherous.
> Consuming that much caffeine is terrible for your heart.
He's talking about 800mg, and I doubt it. 400mg is well known to be a safe daily level. I doubt by doubling it you will experience massive negative side effects.
Here in Finland (possibly highest caffeine consumption per capita in the world?) there are people who have been drinking well over >1000mg/day for decades and life expectancy and heart health among the population is normal.
I agree it's not good for my heart. I keep my caffeine intake considerably lower now, always less than the 400mg max that the FDA recommends, usually less than that.
I'm not sure that adderrall is significantly healthier for the heart. I did take it for a bit but I found adderral to be unbelievably terrible. I would take a small dose at like 7am, and I still would have trouble getting to sleep at night, and when I did get sleep it didn't feel terribly restful. I was only on it for about a week and that was enough.
Obviously if it works for you, don't let me take that away from you.
> I would take a small dose at like 7am, and I still would have trouble getting to sleep at night
Was this an extended release verson like Vyvanse? I had an absolutely terrible time with that for the same reasons. If that was your experience with plain dextroamphetamine, totally sounds like it's just not meant for you!
I tried the three big ones: regular Adderall, Adderall extended release, and Vyvance. None of them really helped my focus and all three really screwed with my sleep.
Kind of ironically, it turned out that a lot of my focus issues were due to (at the time) undiagnosed sleep apnea. The caffeine and the adderall sort of became band-aids that covered up the real problems.
Good Lord no. Sudafed is nothing like Adderall and Adderall is nothing like caffeine, for starters.
I was on a low 10mg time release dose of Adderall for about 6 years. I had a lapse of insurance and could no longer afford it. I weaned myself off over a month and the withdrawals were absolutely fucking terrible.
Just fucking bad advice dude.
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
Pure caffeine is dirt cheap to produce at the enormous scale that it is consumed worldwide. Appeal to nature is a logical fallacy.
Just get some perfectly fine caffeine if that's what you want, nothing wrong with it.
> 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
https://wondermark.com/c/389/
coke etc will destroy your teeth, if not cleaned off regularly.
( don't "ask me how i know" ! )
> if not cleaned off regularly.
Just rinse it off with water?
It's an acid, which softens your enamel. You should ideally rinse with something that remineralizes the enamel, i.e. flouride.
As long as its a rinse thats fine, you shouldn't brush your teeth immediately after.
You probably don't have to do anything special, your saliva is surprising effective at repairing trivial damage from minor acids as long as you give it time. Pounding acid after acid all day long is how you get in trouble.
Also, an effective drink after soda is unsweetened tea! The tea plant is extremely efficient at extracting fluoride from the ground and tea always has fluoride. Thats why consuming gallons of cheap tea can give you floridosis!
Life hack: get your teeth replaced with metal fillings, and that acid will remove any oxidation that forms on them.
I've been drinking loads of coke Zero (up to 3 liters a day, these days it's about 2 liters), and my teeth are fine. I'm 40 and have been drinking it for most of my life, it started when I was about 16, with regular coke back then. Maybe I'm lucky.
> and my teeth are fine
says the dentist? or says you?
after a check-up i was strongly recommended to stop taking soft drinks...no symptoms whatsoever but the teeth are weakening
My dentist, annual consultation.
Hope you don’t have diabetes
I'm regularly afraid of things like that, not only for drinking too much coke but also for not having exactly the healthiest lifestyle overall. I've tried reducing coke a few times with some luck here and there, but eventually got back to it everytime. For now, my annual checkups are good.
[flagged]
I mean, you could say the same thing about coffee.
As a coffee drinker the "bizarrely addictive" comment does not resonate with me at all.
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.
I don't particularly like coffee, so it's not addictive for me as well. But neither are the energy drinks that I actually like. Conversely, there are people heavily addicted to coffee, whether you want to call that "bizzarely" or not.
So, we can haggle over details, but overall I don't see a dramatic qualitative difference.
Coffee is also slightly diuretic, so it's not a "drink to quench your thirst" drink, at least not to me. Water (plain or fizzy/flavored), milk, diet sodas, etc. fill that niche.
Probably. As I said, I've always hated coffee so I've never really had any desire to consume large quantities of it, so I can't speak to that.
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.
$3-4 is a lot. They are 0.99 € here (tax included).
It very much depends on the brand. I was initially buying the Monster drinks at a local gas station where I believe they were $3.25.
Eventually I transitioned to the Aldi brand which was I think around $1.
I meant specifically the Monster drinks. Red Bull for example is closer to 2 € here. The cheapest Aldi energy drinks are 0.29 €.
You pay a significant markup getting it at gas stations, but looking at a Monster on Walmart.com, it's still like $2.68. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Monster-Energy-Zero-Ultra-Energy-...
I guess it's cheaper in Europe.
Drip coffee has ~40-50% more caffeine per 8oz serving than Red Bull (about 90-100mg vs 65mg). The nice thing about coffee is that the mouth-puckering tannins make it harder to absolutely pound them, like one can do easily with cans of Red Bull.
Yeah, the real problem with Red Bull is that it's caffeine-spiked Gatorade. So you're drinking to satisfy cravings but also just because you're thirsty.
A 12 oz can of Celsius has 200mg of caffeine.
You could but you'd be quite disingenuous if you did considering that coffee delivers caffeine without a bunch of added sugar.
I was drinking the sugar free energy drinks, so I wasn't getting a ton of sugar.
Still not saying it's healthy but it wasn't because of too much sugar.
Sugar free/low sugar energy drinks are really common, and most coffee drinkers I know are mixing in sugar or creamer or something in their coffee, so I don't think they're that different. Personally, as someone who is super sensitive to bitterness, coffee has never worked for me, so if I need a caffeine boost, I go for a sugar free Red Bull or a white Monster
Sugar-free energy drinks aren’t rare (at least here in Europe), and people are putting fat and sugar in their coffee as well.
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.
> 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'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...
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.
I think the most convincing example isn't energy drinks but rather Panara bread's energy blaster drinks that they had to stop selling. [1] It seems like they used all the same ingredients common to a lot of energy drinks, but they used more of them.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/business/panera-lawsuit-charg...
The caffeinated lemonade was amazing, but I have a very high caffeine tolerance (1000mg+ a day) and it made me jittery. Can’t imagine what effect it had on people without a serious tolerance.
That lemonade was stupidly high, 390mg caffeine. Only serious addicts could drink that without noticing strong effects.
What’s most remarkable about that case, is that it was a Panera. Could have added 50mg and it would still be more caffeinated than I would expect of the establishment. There was no need to go to the extreme end.
holy, that's quite a lot.
Even the strongest energy drink I've ever seen sold retail in the US had "only" 300mg of caffeine. And it came with plenty of signage on the packaging, indicating very prominently how high the caffeine levels were. I usually drink 200mg a day total (sometimes, but rarely, crossing into the 300mg territory), and you were totally correct, there is absolutely no way to not notice when that 300mg comes from a single drink.
In no world would I expect a random caffeinated drink at Panera to go above that.
>consumed an equivalent of 10 energy drinks+10 shots of hard liquor
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)
Red Bulls are a pretty pedestrian caffeine content by today’s standards, 80mg/can. Other brands are usually 150-200 mg.
Fair point, but yeah, it is still quite a crazy amount, esp in terms of alcohol, even for someone like me. And I am saying this as someone with very strong alcohol tolerance, not as a (likely) smaller 18 year old woman with way less tolerance.
I had 10 Jaeger bombs one time and I woke up in Belgium.
Did you have those jagerbombs in Belgium to begin with or while on the way to Belgium?
I had them at the Giraffe in Leuven.
So I was already in Belgium.
I expected to take the train back home at 9. Instead I regained consciousness at five in the morning. Except I was already fully awake, when I "woke up", walking back to town. My body was just on autopilot. For 9 hours straight.
I found that very peculiar, and subsequently moderated my alcohol intake.
A friendly stranger sent my wallet back a few days later.
And doing "only alcohol" vs "alcohol plus energy drink" research is quite misleading: college kids are using it to mask the taste of alcohol, so it is basically a certainty that they'll drink more alcohol and drink it faster. And because alcohol is bad that will obviously lead to worse outcomes.
If you want to do proper research on the impact of the caffeine part you'd have to do, say, "alcohol with Red Bull" vs "alcohol with Sprite".
I agree 100% but in the case of the 18year old the amount of caffeine involved is probably more likely to blame.
Still, wtf are you doing drinking that much caffeine. Following that logic we should also ban espresso martinis, Irish coffee, and coffee liquors.
There seem to be heart issues involved in most of the energy drink related deaths. More specifically, people finding out they had heart issues, by dying.
So "those people just shouldn't drink caffeine then" would be the standard advice, except that some people apparently die before they realize that they're in that category. (It seems to be mostly young people? My country recently banned energy drinks for people under 18, they now check your age at the supermarket if you try to buy them.)
The strange thing is, if it's caused by caffeine, we'd also be hearing about people dying from having too many coffees, but you never hear about that. Maybe it's some of the other ingredients (taurine, guarana) or the combination?
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.
This comment feels like reading a forum in the mid-2000s, haha.
The Rip It people are usually vets - Rip Its were the only ones you could get reliably while deployed in the ME.
I don't know anyone who actually drinks Bawls - most of my gamer and IT friends do Monster Zero and Monster Ultra. You can get them basically everywhere and the fruity ones actually taste pretty good.
LAN parties haven't really been a huge thing in a long time, sadly, outside of convention-style events.
Cherry AMP was great until they started putting sucralose in it. It was close to how Mtn Dew Game Fuel used to taste before they... started putting sucralose in that.
The original AMP is still around! At least in the US midwest.
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.
https://xkcd.com/1035/
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.
Not true, a 16oz monster has 140mg caffeine, a 12 oz starbucks has 235-270mg.
At the bottom of the label it’s listing caffeine from all sources 160mg here: https://www.walmart.com/ip/12-Pack-Monster-Energy-Drink-Zero...
So not the original is 160mg as are most of their options, only the low carb monster is 140mg meanwhile Java monster hits 300mg. https://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-content/monster
Starbucks has a wide range of coffee at different sizes with different amounts of caffeine. A 16 or 20oz standard double expresso is 150mg as are many other options. https://www.caffeineinformer.com/the-complete-guide-to-starb...
I think at this point the zero cal/low cal ones are more popular. I don't know anyone who drinks Black Monster, while White Monster (zero cal) is so popular it's literally a meme. You go to a store and most of the shelf space is the low cal/zero cal options.
It’s not that significant but don’t assume low calorie means a specific amount of caffeine.
Monster Energy Ultra Sunrise, Sugar Free Energy Drink is 155mg which is an unusual number for them.
My daily morning coffee is about that size though, so it's not huge to me. :)
And how much of that is milk, honey, or just water from making weak coffee?
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.
I make it strong. No sweeteners. An ounce or two of heavy cream. The amount of caffeine is probably quite high.
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.
> An ounce or two of heavy cream.
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.
> That’s 6-12%
"Oh no!"
> McDonald’s is known for having strong coffee
Lol.
> a double espresso from them is under 150mg
McDonalds famously does not publish caffeine numbers because they aren't forced to by the government. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/faq/how-much-caffeine-is-...
But this person did his own measurements and says you're wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc7Aime_cI
Anyway, here are published numbers we can find for reasonable comparison:
> "Oh no!"
No reason to flip out just because you demonstrated your assumption was incorrect. Don’t worry we won’t test if you actually drink strong coffee.
> this person
You can find random YouTube videos supporting anything. The YouTube algorithm specifically promotes wildly inaccurate results as they are more interesting.
Meanwhile offer sources disagree.
https://baristalife.co/blogs/blog/mcdonalds-caffeine-content > compiled them from McDonald's customer service
They don’t publish numbers for liability reasons as they can’t guarantee consistency across all stores, but finding the average isn’t difficult for them. Similarly people who are willing to sample across large geographic areas can find meaningful averages.
> most popular size
Most popular and representative are very different. You’re skipping a lot of their offerings. People can go from around 40mg of caffeine at Starbucks all well past 300, but 1-3 monster energy drinks per day starts high and skyrockets from there. Some days you want just a little more kick, and more granular options is a significant benefit.
https://www.caffeineinformer.com/the-complete-guide-to-starb...
> Don’t worry
Ok, I won't worry. But only because you said not to.
> compiled them from McDonald's customer service
It sounds like you didn't actually click through and read their source, because that's not where their source says the numbers actually come from. I'll leave finding the answer as a fun exercise. (Hint: the numbers have no relation to any McDonalds products except by USDA category)
> They don’t publish numbers for liability reasons
That's a funny thing you just made up for no reason. It's so strange that other major retailers publish numbers then, but I guess Starbucks is probably too small of a legal target to worry about such things.
Anyway, McDonald's statement on why they don't publish numbers, per my previous comment, is because they aren't required to, which is true.
> didn't actually click through
Actually, I think misunderstood what they said.
Effectively all nutrition labels are just using the FDA’s numbers on their ingredients list. They know how many coffee beans they buy and how many cups they serve. Brewing coffee isn’t going to summon arbitrary amounts of caffeine from the neatherworld.
> just made up
Actually it’s from an internal source though possibly outdated. McDonald’s is rather famous for losing a large lawsuit around coffee. They didn’t just change the temperature and call it a day but went full cya.
>> 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.
I was exaggerating a bit, but afaik none of the ingredients in that list are any kind of mysterious harmful ingredient specific to energy drinks. That's all pretty normal soft drink stuff, plus the carnitine and tartrate which are not very exotic supplements.
Red Bull is a triumph of marketing over... well, everything else. It's not just, from TFA:
it goes back well before that. It comes in a small can so it must be more potent than everyone else's sugary fizz, it costs more than everyone else's sugary fizz so it must be better, it tastes like ass so there must be some health or energy benefit to it, and taurine is about to be banned because it's so... so... well something, so get it now. Its success has been the subject of numerous studies by psychologists and behavioral economists.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.
A can of Monster is actually closer to two typical cups of coffee (usually a bit under 100mg vs 160mg). Though that doesn't change the point being made; nobody would blink at "I drink two cups of coffee most mornings". The various B vitamins also help avoid the jitters that caffeine can cause.
ingredients aside, coffee tastes somewhat natural whereas most energy drinks taste like liquid sweet tarts. I have never had one and felt remotely like it might be healthy.
You are also cutting out preservatives, additives, sucralose, dyes and whatever else is in the long ingredient list.
I would say that's a very sugarcoated version of the Monster energy drink ingredients list[1]. The real list is ten time longer than the ingredients list of a cup of black filter coffee. And one of the items is "natural flavors", which could be hiding a long list of things all by itself.
[1] https://nutritionandingredients.com/monster-energy-drinks-in...
It depends on the drink, but there's often a lot more than those ingredients. The caffeine, while the same as what's in coffee per ml, you are looking at 600ml at a minimum for most of these drinks meaning you 2 cups of coffee for every serving.
Make a 12 oz cup of coffee and put 37g of sugar in it(12 of those little sugar packets at some restaurants). You will get weird looks too.
I think if college kids got really into espresso martinis you'd see a lot of pearl clutching there too.
Whenever I stumble upon articles such as this one, I always just mentally swap the words energy drink with "two coffees and a multivitamin" (or even "one coffee and a multivitamin" if we're talking about a Red Bull) and then the whole article just seems silly.
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?
I have ADHD and noticed an INVERSE effect of caffeine for years, it would mostly just make me tired. That was before being properly medicated with a stimulant. After that, caffeine works the same as anyone else. It’s very weird.
In the internet age, I’ve learned this is pretty common for people with adhd.
I have 6 or so years experience with serious running, and experienced a runners high exactly 1 time.
> INVERSE effect of caffeine for years
It's likely due to some other factor or individual difference. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that stimulants affect people with ADHD any differently than people without ADHD. By differently, I mean having a paradoxical reaction that can only be attributed to having ADHD.
Correlation does not imply causation, but people still try it all the time.
I know someone who doesn't have ADHD, but when she drinks coffee it makes her sleepy. Her whole family drinks coffee before bed!
How come normal people take methamphetamine and go crazy but people with ADHD can take it to feel normal? (One of the less common prescription meds for ADHD is literally just meth but with the government stamp of approval on it)
I'm a psychiatry resident, and I have ADHD. The myth is, in fact, a myth.
More importantly, the dose of desoxyn (methamphetamine) used therapeutically for ADHD is *much* lower than what's consumed recreationally. That's really it. Use low doses, as prescribed, and the risks are minimal/comparable to most alternative stimulants.
It's like asking why a society where everyone has cups of tea twice a day has a different relationship to caffeine than a frat house where they're drinking 3 cans of Red Bull a night.
If anyone is curious, a medical daily dose can be around 20mg and recreational consumption for a non-hardcore user is around 400mg so they’re commonly taking 20x the therapeutic dose
Normal people take way more than that prescribed dose.
I must be strange because I feel no effect from coffee until I drink too much which is when my heart beats too fast for too long and I feel anxious
Energy drinks on the other hand ? The taste sucks but they do work and give me what I guess most people get from coffee ? They make me sharp and pumped up
Sugar
Do you mean the combination with caffeine or just the sugar? Cause I've had very sweet stuff before and it is definitely not producing the same effects
So a shallow search turned up that taurine in energy drinks and thiamine in tea tends to smooth the effects of caffeine
I'd get runner's high sometimes. If you got it, you'd know it. Personally, I only recall it happening for me at end of treadmill and erg and dumbbells session, not on any of the many runs on streets/waterfront/tracks.
The afterglow isn't confused with feeling good about completing exercise, or accomplishment/confidence. Example of confidence: when on a track, I'd run until I felt like I was out of steam, then sprint the last half-lap, just to know I could do that. (Don't try this if your heart isn't currently conditioned for it.)
I've given up caffeine, and hardly ever miss it.
One problem is caffeine for me seems to shift energy around, not create it. It might make me more energetic right now, but then headachey and ugh later. Also creates a dependence: "I feel like crap; I must need more caffeine".
Can also interfere with sleep many hours later, and sleep is super-important. It upsets GI a bit. And personally it seems to magnify some emotions, and, when caffeinated, I will somehow always find a cause of something that needs someone to fight for it (it's uncanny).
I care enough without chemically boosting things. And I'm fortunate to naturally be energetic and sharp without caffeine.
I don't drink even decaf anymore, because it still has too much.
IIRC, detoxing from caffeeine cold-turkey takes a couple weeks. Or zero-caffeine herbal/fruit teas can help with the warm mug of hot liquids ritual substitute. And exercise, hydration, nutrition, and good sleep.
Same. I've been told I'm a "high metabolizer". I can drink a cup of coffee/tea/soda before bed and pass out. No noticable effect.
It's weird that you mention the runner's high, too. I've run 6 miles 3x a week for months on end (PR of 8.5 miles), and I have no idea what other runners are talking about. I've never put the two together before.
The runner's high I've experienced comes after completing a long, hard race and finally getting to rest after pushing myself beyond what training was like.
lol. sounds like it’s time to get diagnosed.
[dead]
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.
It absolutely is. Gambling made legal overnight, exploding into a mega industry? Nah take a look at this scary Red Bull!
I could believe the UK might try to ban selling coffee to under 21s too at the current rate, honestly. There's probably at least one study about stunting growth with coffee?
[flagged]
I mean, there's more than enough reasons to criticise or laugh at the UK that actually exist, without mocking a country for a hypothetical of someone online that hasn't actually been proposed by any politicians or, well, anybody at all?
It is incredibly annoying at the self-checkout being asked to present PHOTO ID to buy a monster energy. I was once denied my beverage, so I walked back over to the meal deal area and purchased a Starbucks canned coffee that had THE SAME LEVEL OF CAFFIENE
You're making the mistake of assuming it has something to do with the caffeine content or caffeine being illegal.
There's one pattern that all these rules have in common: Someone noticed a problem, so they added friction to try and reduce the problem. People are getting fucked up on Red Bull? Add friction to buying a Red Bull. People aren't getting fucked up on coffee? Then don't add friction to coffee. I know us engineer personalities would like to define uniform rules for all caffeinated products or not define any rules, and that's what you should do if you are making a medical robot to maintain someone's caffeine level, but that isn't really how the social world works. It's a quite straightforward loop of observation->response.
[dead]
And a hypothetical banning that isn't totally unreasonable if you look at it objectively.
What other highly addictive cardiotoxic stimulants should we allow to be sold over-the-counter with no age limits whatsoever?
Well, are either of those sold in cans and marketed to children?
Coffee is sold in cans yes. Very popular in Japan. Elsewhere... I think I saw Starbucks cans? Or was it bottles?
Starbucks and Black Rifle both sell coffee in cans right next to the energy drinks now. I haven't personally seen any high-caffeine products marketed to kids personally though.
Jolt Cola felt marketed to kids when I was a kid
Anything with any sort of flavor is argued as being sold to children these days. Except bubblegum flavored vodka I guess. Somehow that has always gotten the pass while people handwring over juul pods.
I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say - at least here I don't see marketing campaigns for flavored vodka targeting children, and unlike energy drinks it's not on store shelves right next to soft drinks.
I never saw those sorts of ads for juul either. People just incorrectly assumed fruity must be for kids and that no adults would want say a mango pod vs pure tobacco flavor. At the gas station that vodka is in the common shelving as its often the 40 proof stuff like orlov with these flavors. The smirnoff in the grocery store depending on the state could be in the same aisle as the soda.
I have had personal health experiences related to them and quit them over twenty years ago before any of this hype.
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.
My understanding is that part of the problem with mixing caffine with alcohol is that it can prevent someone from passing out; which is the body's defense mechanism against alcohol poisoning.
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.
No, the bodies defense against alcohol is vomiting. "Passing out" increases risk, namely that you vomit while asleep, and then choke on the vomit.
Four Lokos were indeed banned in Massachusetts.
Four Loko had to take the caffeine out across the US years ago. Now it’s just 8 standard drinks in a tall boy for $4 - still very much a problem but no caffeine.
The original caffeinated Four Loko formula was discontinued everywhere 16 years ago.
Vodka Red Bull always seemed crazy to me. Caffeine lasts like 6 hours so I drink one at 2 am, what the hell am I doing! Granted people do cocaine so maybe it’s inconsequential.
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.
There is actually quite a lot of variation from person to person in caffeine elimination half-life, from about 1.5-9 hours. Some of my extended family could drink a cup of coffee right before bed without issue.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223808/
Coffee makes me sleepy, for instance.
Espresso martini is the popular caffeine and alcohol combo now.
Good callout! More popular with the ladies too
if you're up til 6, your next day is already shot. who cares about caffeine at 2am at that point.
Crown and Red Bull (tastes better) is my order if I want to drink and dance.
long live 4 loco
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.
Different than coffee?
There certainly is kind of a different culture around people who chug energy drinks compared to people who drink coffee.
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 think there's a certain type that you're talking about that does tend towards energy drinks like that, but it's not true in the other direction, as that type is a minority of energy drink drinkers. Just a particularly noticeable one.
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.
Sure, I guess I've just worked at enough startups that advertise "keeping the fridge full of Red Bull" as some kind of perk, when in reality it kind of ends up being a code for "you'd better enjoy working long, long hours".
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.
>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.
feels like it wouldn't change behavior all that much just choice of the drug
People don't say to themselves "today I want caffeine and alcohol" and then search for products matching their preferred mix ratio. They just see a product meant to get them fucked up, and consume it. The selection of easily available products absolutely matters.
I do that sometimes. Is there something wrong with that? Granted, rarely in the form of an energy drink.
[dead]
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!"
"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.
Why are cold drinks with sugar and caffeine seen as problematic, while hot drinks with sugar and caffeine are seen as perfectly good?
On the one hand it’s nonsense, as you imply.
On the other, ‘energy’ drinks can often have far more sugar and caffeine than e.g. tea or coffee, and are obviously marketed heavily at young people, who can then find themselves consuming unhealthy amounts and/or forming addictions.
So it’s not really a particular drink in moderation that’s a problem per se, but everything else that comes with it.
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.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!
can you point me to any research?
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.
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.
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?
The problem with rational decisionmaking is there are vast areas where only irrational opinions are acceptable. Try the same line of logical reasoning for vaccines, low fat high carb diets, statins, uncontrolled immigration, various economic policies, and let us know how long until you get wrongthink attacks. There are vast irrational areas of discussion where even the faintest hint of rationality is double plus ungood.
Or, the Occam's razor explanation: maybe the lines that you think are rational are actually irrational?
"I can't be out of touch. It's everyone else who is wrong!"
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.
> 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
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.
What health effects compared to other caffeine sources (pills, coffee)
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 is just a moral panic because college students like to drink vodka Red Bulls, as opposed to drinking Irish coffees or any similar combination of caffeine and alcohol.
Yeah, seems like the problem is alcohol + caffeine, and at least in the US, those combinations in a single drink have been banned (ie Four Loko)
Glad to know you uncritically will sign up for the moral panic of the times.
Nah, no moral panic here. I don't see the reason to combine stimulants with depressants, you then just mask the underlying issues with both. Hence often the regulation of the combination.
So do you want to outlaw espresso martinis? Or rum and cokes?
Sure. Realistically you simply regulate them. Espresso martinis are already long a popular 'after dinner' cocktail with the assumption that you'll be buzzed from the caffeine and able to drive better.
> The best case is it does no 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).
what harm are you thinking of? any pointers?
Arrhythmia, for example?
>The best case is it does no harm.
Isn't it pretty obvious that people drink them for... energy?
> so I’m a bit odd I guess
No. You, and I, are sensible....
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.
[flagged]
People can make up their own minds as to whether they are willing to take the risks, but first they must be given accurate information. It is important to know if the studies that say something is safe has been funded by the industries that profit from it.
It sure is our business if companies are misappropriating science to sell harmful products or advertize harmful misuse of their products.
Better spend your time going after those flat-earthers then
Say it louder for the folks in the back! I drink monsters on ocasion, there was a time I was drinking one a day.
And it was exclusivelly people who couldn't go without multiple cups of coffe a day telling me how it's so much worse and how bad its going to be.
Yes I am aware energy drinks are not the healthiest choice of drink. But you could say the same for anything that isn't water or naturally blended juice. Besides everything is bad in excess.
But it's my body, I get to choose what and how much of it I consume!
Don't most people grow out of the "I'm going to hurt myself by doing the exact opposite of my parents' advice" phase as teenagers?
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.
Speak for yourself, I love the taste of taurine. Plus there's something strangely satisfying about the taste of a standard diet Red Bull. There's no attempt at natural flavoring there: you can rightly tell God had no part in making it.
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.
>Please ... don't just write "it tastes good" ... no it don't.
taste is subjective. i dont drink them often, but i enjoy a can of original green monster occasionally because i find it tastes good.
I use on-the-go packets of energy drink powder that I drop into a small plastic bag when I travel. This allows me to have access to tasty caffeine anywhere I have water because I bring a bottle. Coffee does not offer the convenience or portability that energy drinks do.
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.
You can't ask someone why they like something more while just denying the most common, subjective reason. I don't like coffee because in my opinion it does not taste good. A peach red bull tastes just better in my opinion. Also, two things can taste good for a person at the same time. I like my energy drink which is easily accessible in my fridge but when I am out and a bout a fresh strawberry, banana or any other fresh fruit is of course better.
I drink Celsius. Not every day, but here and there. Also coffee.
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.
Coffee gives me heartburn and acid reflux.
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.
I asked a coworker who gave a few reasons. It's easier/cheaper to buy in bulk. He gets them by the case. He also like sweet flavors more than bitter flavors.
I drink, sugar-free Red Bull and monster ultra.
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>
Xylitol gum and a sugary drink that you consume fast or just a sugar free drink in general is away better for the appearance of your teeth.
> Please ... don't just write "it tastes good" ... no it don't.
How do you not know that different things taste good to different people?
It’s faster.
Coffee is very strong in taste and is like a wrecking ball in your mouth.
Habit. Been drinking Red Bull or Monster since I was a teen. In my mid 30s now.
Because I dislike the taste of coffee and people look at you weirdly when you pull out a 1 kg bag of caffeine and a portable precision scale.
I drink both coffee (no sweetener) and Monster Ultra, because I like both. Although I prefer coffee.
red bull doesn't taste great personally but most flavors of monster actually do to me. and they're less bitter than coffee and carbonated, which is nice.
If you are a Monster flavor enjoyer, I can personally attest that the flavoring in the UK is very nice but, in the USA, it's absolutely putrid
I wonder why the flavoring would be different? Also zero or the full fat versions, because maybe it's different types of artificial sweeteners involved?
A lot of food and beverages are tweaked to suit the local market. I find monster mango in the UK to actually taste like real mango but the one in the USA tastes like chemicals which I think is less tolerable
Because they taste better than bitter dirt water.