Jimi Hendrix, Hulk Hogan, Del Monte, Red Bull, Mother, Full Throttle, Cocaine, and many other colorful name-brands are vying for your money. These energy drinks and many others have made their way ( one was banned ) into the marketplace promising to give you more energy.
While many people are drinking them, most of those same drinks have not much more than sugar and caffeine for active ingredients. Drinking such things in an abundance can be a hazard to your health. I will take a look at the top energy drinks and tell you about the dangers of their active ingredients.
The energy drink business is booming ! But all is not well for the consumer. These energy drinks on the most part rely on sugar and or caffeine to do their work. Healthfinder .gov did a small study on whether or not the sugar in these drinks really gave you a beneficial boost during the day.
Their findings actually showed that beyond the initial fifteen minute boost of the huge amount of sugar, the energy drinks actually made folks even MORE drowsy. To no surprise, it was the caffeine that gave a boost to those workers who were in that time of day called the ” low-energy ” period in the afternoon. The massive amount of sugar has a negative impact in more ways than one.
Processed sugar in massive amounts over time has the ability to overwhelm the pancreas. Your pancreas generates insulin in relation to the amount of sugar ( glucose or whatever types ) in the blood stream. The more sugar you put into your blood stream, the more insulin your pancreas must generate to offset your sugar intake.
If your pancreas is “worn out” by being overworked from too much intake of sugar, diabetes can begin. Backing off on the huge amounts of sugar from energy drinks can give your body a rest from having to produce mountains of insulin. For this reason, since high amounts of processed sugar is a major active ingredient in most energy drinks, it is also the first on my danger list.
Caffeine is from the coffee plant. What about caffeine ? It works by blocking a brain chemical ( adenosine ) involved in sleep. This nifty chemical warfare that caffeine can do is not the whole story. You can overdose on caffeine. With enough caffeine, you could be literally on your way to the doctor. This past week a girl in Europe had to do just that when she drank five espressos.
Some of the more popular energy drinks have the same amount of caffeine as one blast of espresso. That is not good, if you like coffee and energy drinks both. Believe it or not caffeine also causes you to lose valuable B vitamins needed for none other than what I would call “normal” energy creation in the body. Be very careful with caffeine. Small amounts of caffeiene are okay. But when it gets to be at the levels of espresso, it gets second place on my list of dangerous ingredients in energy drinks.
Third on the list is the ingredient ephedrine, also called ephedra. Two high school students in California passed out after drinking energy drinks containing ephedra. It can cause heart problems. In testimonies to the House of Representatives, ephedra has been described as
a drug that increases heart rate and blood pressure at low doses up to and including strokes, seizures, and even death at high doses. Ephedrine gets third place on my list of dangerous ingredients in energy drinks, not because it is less dangerous, but because it is not found in such high doses as the first two.
The prestigious Mayo Clinic has told us that energy drinks are “not necessarily” bad for your health, but that they also should not be seen as a “natural” energy source. That is true for most of the popular energy drinks, but certainly not for all. Some use natural sources and have no dangerous ingredients.
