13 Energy Drinks In 3 Sessions

circletimessquare writes "As a member of the cult of caffeine, as I suspect many Slashdot readers are, I was pleasantly amused by this story in The New York Times entitled Opening 13 Cans of Whoop (reg req). Our brave reporter sucks down a number of energy drinks of various parentages and gives us the lowdown on their taste, appearance, ingredients, overall effect, and dubious appeal. Example: 'At this point, my energy level was not only elevated, it was speeding toward the red line. I felt myself staring holes through my computer screen, typing at five times my normal rate and thinking far too creatively about life questions like how many AA batteries I needed to buy when I went to the drug store. My mood was chipper. Too chipper.'"

caffeine

[blankinthefill]

While the article does look funny, I personaly don't drink any caffeine. ever. I've found that I function better, think faster, and am actually less tired with out caffine than with it. Plus, caffine is bad for you. and it's also the most abused drug on earth.

Energy Drinks Vs. Sleep

[Poeir]

While it's real great to be awake and theoretically able to do something productive until the wee hours of the night, there is no substitute for honest to goodness sleep. It's a lot cheaper than a $2 eight-ounce can, too.

Sleep when you can. You won't regret it.

Whatever

[molafson]

I felt myself staring holes through my computer screen, typing at five times my normal rate and thinking far too creatively about life questions like how many AA batteries I needed to buy when I went to the drug store.

Whatever! You'd think the guy was smoking crystal meth or something. Anyway, if you want to feel healthy and alert, try:
(a) Eating nutritiously and sparingly,
(b) Exercising every day, and
(c) Sleeping regularly (same time every day) for 8 hours.

The good old days....

[PeterPumpkin]

Red Bull wasn't the first energy drink. Remember, Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine.

I'm amazed

[BCW2]

that people spend that kind of money on this stuff. Give me a bag of coffee beans and stand back. If needed I will make it stiff enough to stand on it's own, you don't drink it, you chew it. Who needs a mug.

Of course I don't understand Starbucks either. $4 for a cup of coffee? I like mine plain black, not that sissified crap.

If you need energy drinks...

[jb.hl.com]

If you need energy drinks to stay alert, you either aren't getting enough sleep (which is dumb) or you're utterly insane.

Normal people in normal sleep routines should be able to get by without caffeine. Hell, I've stayed up all night on nothing more than water before.

cutting down on caffein

[arabagast]

um, I know this is kinda blasphemy here on slashdot, but my tip is actually to reduce your dose of caffeine. I used to drink *lots* of coffee and other caffeinated beverages earlier, but decided to try a little break and watch the difference. My conclusion is as follows (beware: these are my personal experiences, your might be completely different)

1. If you are going to be doing a lot of intensive work, in need of intense concentration (such as coding), you shouldn`t pour down coffee like you never saw it before. The coffee dehydrates your body, leading to less-than-optimal body functionality and can actually make you less suited to do the job intented.
2. If you, as we all do once in a while, drink buckets of coffee - remember to drink lots of water or other beverage to compensate for the water loss brought on by the caffeine. It`s important to have enough water in your body, we're water creatures after all ^^.

but, who am I kidding - Coffee is G-O-D :P

Re:Energy Drinks Vs. Sleep

[metlin]

True.

And again, if you drink coffee in limited quantities (like say, not more than a couple of cups a day), you will notice that when you need to stay up, having an extra cup or two really has an effect.

When you are a heavy coffee drinker who cuts back on coffee, the first couple of times you have more than your usual dose of caffeine, it takes you on a real alertness mode.

And the worst part is that the more the coffee you have, the less regular your sleeping habits become. You stop having good sleep, and therefore your waking hours become kinda blurry. At which point, you resort to more caffeine. A vicious circle.

A cup (at most two) a day is just about fine, IMHO.

Super Size Me fad

[timeOday]

How many me-too articles we'll be seeing thanks to Super Size Me (the movie about the guy who ate only at McDonalds for a month with bad results).

I don't see how this evaluation of energy drinks means anything, because he had more than one per sitting. Who's to say which one did what, or how they cross-reacted?

Re:If you need energy drinks...

[Anonymous Coward]

May I introduce you to medical residency (i.e. the system where one becomes a doctor).

..at least he can buy any softdrink he want to

[rundgren]

OT, but like he points out: "sale of Red Bull, the leading energy drink in Europe, has been restricted to pharmacies in some countries there because of its high caffeine content." Here in Norway they actually outlawed it completely (which can be done because we think are to good for the European Union and it's free trade...) Of course we are used ridicolous legislation regarding to anything remotely stimulating, after all I live in a country which has about the same maximum punishment for possession of larger amounts of cannabis as for murder in the first degree (21 years, (while rape typically gets you 3...))

Re:caffeine

[Anonymous Coward]

Chances are it's actually the sugar-insuline cycle that is behind the wild swings - soda is usually crammed with sugar.

Re:Cheaper maybe...

[Poeir]

Yes, but the longer you stay up, the less productive you are. You're getting nowhere fast if you stay up an extra hour and do as much work as you'd do in half an hour when fully alert. If your job is occupying space, then an extra hour is handy, but if your job involves making correct decisions, that hour of sub-par work can cost you (or at least someone) way more than an hour of time.

Re:Pah! I laugh!

[stephenisu]

Whoa deamn!

Just keep in mind LD-50 is the point where HALF of the HEALTHY subjects are dead. Many die well before that, many also get ill. I don't know about YOUR particular physique, but most slashdotters I know in real life (myself included) are not exactly healthy.

Careful man, you could suffer short or long term health effects.

Anywho, I gotta stop typing, my BAWLS with guarana is nearly 45 F, I gotta finish it now.

Re:caffeine

[the_mad_poster]

Caffeine is a device that turns coders into caffiene joke posters on Slashdot.

Re:Cocaine?

[insomaniac]

Why do so few nerds smoke weed or coke

Well, here in the netherlands there are a lot of geeks who do smoke weed, I'm one of them, if its nicely grown weed it gives me a focus on what I'm doing. I code very well when I smoked a nice joint. The problem is starting the work, but when finally started its like your in your own coding world and you can visualise the entire structure of the code, even better than when you are sober.

I've tried cocaine a few times and didn't really like that, MDMA was more fun but one should not do that often either. And these are party drugs, not drugs you take when your alone in front of your computer.

But then again I think that weed as a drug is less harmfule than alcohol for many reasons which I won't go into unasked. ;)

Re:Makes me think of the old joke ...

[Doctor Faustus]

Take instant, and make it go faster.

Is it me, or was that an utterly worthless article

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I have been reading too many tech sites, but I was hoping for some actual testing and results, but this guy gave us a day in the life. Hello, which drink is the best for energy, doofus????

Just take a pill

[Joe Tie.]

If you're so obsessed with getting the perfect caffeine ratio, just buy some caffeine pills. You'll get nearly the same effect, can take it faster, you won't have to get up to piss as a result, and it's only something around a nickel or less per pill. In comparison to a drink that'd cost twenty times more and deliver less caffeine.

Re:Whatever

[The Bod]

All around, pretty good advice, but you might be wrong about what dehydrates you. According to Dr. Dean Edel [healthcentral.com] just about any beverage will hydrate you as long as it isn't alcoholic. I heard this on one of his radio segments a long time back. He was citing some study that was recently published at the time. I don't remember any of the details, except that caffienated beverages were specifically identified as not deyhdrating.

Personally I've recently taken a liking to the sugar free crystal light I can get at Sam's Club or Walmart. I am enjoying the "Pink Lemonade" flavor as I type this. I am talking about the stuff sweetened with sucralose (Splenda) and not the headache inducing Nutrasweet. So far I have only seen this stuff in 4-packs of 16 oz. bottles. My goal is to displace my beloved high-carb Mt. Dew in my diet with something that will let me lose weight.

Re:...but not enough "to give a fly a buzz"

[The Bod]

Actually, if you need a cough suppressant, you should try getting cough syrup with codiene. Codiene is a Level II narcotic, but you can get the cough syrup with codiene from a pharmacist without a prescription. However, many pharmacies won't carry it (fear of robberies) and you have to sign some paper to get it. It is up to the pharmacist's discretion whether or not you can get it without a prescription. According to one of my wife's professors, codiene is the best cough supressant available. I wish I had known all this a couple years ago when I was suffering with bronchitis...

Disclaimer: My student pharmacist wife is at work right now and is not able to check my facts.

Re:MORE INTERESTING

[Idarubicin]

They wouldn't have shares in fluoride mines perhaps now would they???!!!

The toothpaste on my shelf contains 0.24% sodium fluoride; that's about one part in a thousand that's fluoride, by mass. If we assume that I go through 250 g of toothpaste per year--about half a pound--that's 0.25 g of fluoride I consume each year. Over a quarter billion or so Americans, that would be sixty or seventy tons of fluoride.

The average per capita water use in the United States is (rounded up) about two hundred gallons per day. (Ref. [epa.gov]) Assuming that all of that water gets fluoridated at 1 part per million, that's another 200 tons per year fluoride.

If we assume that the fluoride was originally sourced from calcium fluoride (fluorspar), that's a total of about 900 tons of fluorspar to meet the entire nation's dental fluride requirements.

Current U.S. use of fluorspar is on the order of six hundred thousand tons per year. (Ref. [usgs.gov]) Nearly all is imported, and two-thirds (66%) of those imports are from China.

To conclude, fluoride use for public health purposes makes a negligible contribution to total domestic fluorine demand--less than a fifth of one percent of the total fluorine consumed. Also, domestic leaders haven't got anything to gain by selling more fluorides--the U.S. imports most of its supply from a country it doesn't particularly like, and where it definitely doesn't own any of the local natural resources.

Re:Energy Drinks Vs. Sleep

[NanoGator]

"Actually, I find I am more effective at certain kinds of tasks (especially programming) if I attack them in long sessions. The longer I keep going, the more into the right mind set I get and the more productive I am. This is especially true for involved tasks that need a lot of separate considerations to be maintained."

This is true in the programming world, but the opposite is basically true in the creative world. If I spent 15 hours making a 3D model, I'll have gotten maybe 10 hours worth of productivity out of it.

I don't mean this to negate your point, just sharing one of my own observations. Having done programming before, I agree with what you've said. I've accidently programmed until midnight before. Heh.

Re:Taurine vs. Caffeine

[barakn]

The article wasn't science, but your idea isn't either. The only way for you to be sure is if somebody packages caffeine or caffeine/taurine into indistinguishable capsules and then feeds them to you over successive nights in a double-blind experiment (they can't know what they're giving to you either until afterwards). Otherwise you're just testing the placebo effect. Perhaps your experience with Red Bull is influenced by Red Bull's massive marketing campaign. Coffee advertising tends to advertise its flavor, not its stimulant properties.

Re:No, man, you got it all wrong!

[Mr. Slippery]

Time is money, and caffine buys you more time that would have been lost to sleep.

Stimulants lets you borrow time, not buy it. You either make it up later with extra rest, or you die earlier from the negative health consequences of drug abuse. (Yes, caffeine is a drug, the most abused drug in the U.S., and its abuse will damage your health.)

Re:Energy Drinks Vs. Sleep

[thynk]

And the worst part is that the more the coffee you have, the less regular your sleeping habits become. You stop having good sleep, and therefore your waking hours become kinda blurry. At which point, you resort to more caffeine.

You say that like it's a Bad Thing(tm). I've always had the view that sleep is for the weak anyway.

I remember reading an article where 'they' were doing research for a drug that 'replaced' sleep - you could go 4 or 5 days with out the negative side effects. My first and only thought was 'Gimme - I wanna beta test'