More than 500 new energy drinks launched worldwide this year, and coffee fans are probably too old to understand why.
Energy drinks attract fan mail on their own MySpace pages. They spawn urban legends. They get reviewed by bloggers. They're a US$3.4-billion a year industry that grew by 80 per cent last year. They taste like carbonated cough syrup.
Thirty-one per cent of U.S. teenagers say they drink energy drinks, according to Simmons Research. That represents 7.6 million teens, a jump of almost three million in three years.
Nutritionists warn that the drinks, laden with caffeine and sugar, can hook kids on an unhealthy jolt-and-crash cycle. The caffeine comes from multiple sources, making it hard to tell how much the drinks contain. Some have B vitamins, which when taken in megadoses can cause rapid heartbeat, and numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.
Danger only adds to the appeal, said Bryan Greenberg, a marketing consultant.
Greenberg said the fierce competition among hundreds of new drinks, with Austria-based Red Bull guarding the biggest market share, leads to a "ratcheting up" of taboo names as companies try to break out from the crowd.
Cocaine Energy Drink, which launched in September and now sells in convenience stores and nightclubs in six states, is the latest example, following a twisted logic set by drinks named Pimpjuice and Bawls.
Hannah Kirby of the Las Vegas company behind Cocaine Energy Drink, said she and her husband, Redux Beverage founder James Kirby, had wanted to call their drink Reboot. When they found out the name was taken, they decided to get provocative.
"We knew we would get noticed against a thousand other energy drinks," she said. "We knew kids would find it cool, but we also wanted to stress the idea that it's an energy drink, you don't need drugs." Their slogan is
The Legal Alternative.The Kirbys' 18-year-old grew up hearing he shouldn't drink energy drinks on a school night.
Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz based his product on tonics sold in Asia. He started selling Red Bull in 1987 in his native Austria, and today 2.5 billion cans are sold a year in more than 130 countries.
Rumors have swirled around Red Bull for years. Contrary to hearsay, the ingredient taurine (an amino acid important in making bile to aid digestion) is not made from bull urine, and Mateschitz did not learn about Red Bull from rickshaw drivers in Thailand. The urban legends-debunking website www.snopes.com has a page devoted to exposing the false claim that Red Bull contains a banned substance linked to brain tumours.
No evidence was ever found that sudden deaths were caused by people drinking Red Bull. But it's true that a Swedish government study recommended that energy drinks not be used to quench thirst or replenish liquid when exercising. And they should not be mixed with alcohol.
Too late. Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing now produce several "energy beers" - beer containing caffeine. And Red Bull and vodka - mixed up by bartenders who call it a Friday Flattener or a Dirty Pompadour - has been popular for a decade.
A Brazilian study found college students didn't feel as drunk as they actually were after drinking vodka and Red Bull. Their perception of their co-ordination and reaction time didn't match objective tests.
The potential for accidents and alcohol poisoning worries Dr. Sandra Braganza, a pediatrician and nutrition expert at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in New York. As she prepared to write an article about energy drinks for a pediatrics journal, she was surprised how little published research she could find on them.
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The truth is, we don't know what kind of effects these ingredients can have," Braganza said of taurine, glucuronolactone and guarana. "We have to start doing more studies on this."
Earlier this month, a new study found a surprising number of caffeine overdose reports to a Chicago poison control centre. These involved young people taking alertness pills such as NoDoz or energy drinks, sometimes mixed with alcohol or other drugs. During three years of reports to the centre, the researchers found 265 cases of caffeine abuse. Twelve per cent of those required a trip to the hospital. The average age of the caffeine user was 21.
"Young people are taking caffeine to stay awake, or perhaps to get high, and many of them are ending up in the emergency department," said Dr. Danielle McCarthy of Northwestern University, who conducted the study. "Caffeine is a drug and should be treated with caution, as any drug is."
How much caffeine do energy drinks contain? A University of Florida study found that some products, although served in cans two-thirds the size of a standard can of Coke, contain two to four times the amount of caffeine as that Coke. Energy drinks are unregulated in the United States, but the authors of the University of Florida paper suggest warning labels for them.
And now energy drinks are moving toward bigger cans with some products raising the caffeine content to gain a competitive edge, said John Sicher of Beverage Digest. The biggest, so far, is 680 ml.
Full of sugar and caffeine, energy drinks share the same health problems as soft drinks, says dietitian Molly Morgan. But some parents and coaches have bought the message that the drinks can enhance kids' performance in sports and increase concentration in school.
The evidence is weak, involving tiny studies. British research by a scientist who has since received funding from Red Bull found that among 36 volunteers, those who drank the product improved aerobic endurance and recalled numbers better. A British study of 42 people found Red Bull had no effect on memory, but did improve attention and verbal reasoning.
A University of Wisconsin study of 14 students found that two energy drink ingredients, caffeine and taurine, didn't improve short-term memory but led to slower heart rates and higher blood pressure. Since some energy drink ingredients generally speed up heart rates, the researchers could only speculate on the cause.
Carol Ann Rinzler, author of "Nutrition for Dummies," examined the labels of the top three energy drinks.
"The labels simply don't deliver all the facts," she said. "For example, while all list caffeine as an ingredient, and most tell you exactly how much caffeine is in the drink, they also list guarana, a caffeine source, as a separate ingredient but don't tell how much caffeine one gets from the guarana."
Rinzler said energy drinks also deliver a huge hit of sugar.
"Drink more than one and you get lots of sugar - 14 teaspoons (70 ml) in two cans, 21 teaspoons (105 ml) in three," she said. Add in megadoses of some vitamins; unnecessary nutrients (taurine) and more caffeine than plain sodas and you get "a fast up-and-down sugar high and a really rough caffeine buzz," she said. "And drinking two or three cans a day for a period of weeks or months might trigger some side effects from the vitamin megadoses."
Provided by: Associated PressWritten by: CARLA K. JOHNSON
