Where to begin my story. In my first year of university, I used to pull all-nighters pretty frequently. I quickly learned that consuming multiple energy drinks throughout the night/next day could keep me up. I would drink 2 monsters just to stay up all night and then another monster at around noon to keep me up for the day. I really only consumed energy drinks when I had papers due the next day and I needed the energy boost to stay up.
As the year went on, I found myself slowly drinking energy drinks more and more often. It became something of a ritual to have an energy drink before a show or performance. Then I'd start having them before classes.
Before I knew it, I had replaced coffee with energy drinks as my "pick-me-up." However, I started hearing about many energy drink related deaths. A basketball player took 4 Redbull before a game and collapsed on the court. There were other similar stories, but it seemed like the common factor in every story was the large amount of energy drinks that were guzzled down prior to the death.
Naturally, this scared the fuck out of me, so I decided to do my own research. The problem is that none of the deaths can be specifically tied to the energy drinks themselves. We know that Taurine (The main ingredient that energy drinks are comprised of) causes your heart to race and dehydrate you. We know that mixing Taurine with Caffeine might not be so smart an idea, since both of them have the same effect, therefore increasing your heart rate even further. So I guess it makes sense that a kid who drinks 4 (It tells you not to exceed one per day on the back) before a basketball game might die, especially if he had a history of known heart conditions in his family. I mean, 4 cans of caffeine plus taurine dehydrating you while you're hustling your ass off to chase a ball and sweating even more on top of that? Bad idea.
Here's what scares me, though. There's no link to the deaths, but that doesn't really matter. I'm afraid that energy drinks are going to kill me slowly, speeding up my heart rate unnaturally until I eventually have a stroke.
I'm now at 1 energy drink minimum a day (I don't usually exceed that). I tried to not have one today and I ended up having a bad headache. I'm at the point where I've trained my body to rely on them to alleviate me of fatigue, so I'm extremely tired when I go through the day without an energy drink. The main reason I started drinking them instead of coffee was because coffee stains your teeth, but if energy drinks are as dangerous as some people seem to think, then I could actually die in a number of years. Stained teeth or death? Doesn't really seem like a hard choice to make. I was naive to start drinking energy drinks without doing research first because now that I'm addicted, it's really hard to stop.
I'd like to try and wean myself off them slowly, but at this point I've grown accustomed to one every single day, so it's going to be hard. Like anything addictive, you can't just quit cold turkey. I want to slowly lower my drink count until it's at about 1 a week or 1 every 2 weeks and then stop abruptly.
What do you guys think about energy drinks? Have your experiences been totally different from mine?
- Umed Abdullah
No comments:
Post a Comment