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- Hacker News
- 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.by seanicus
- 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.
by PaulRobinson - 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.
- 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.
- 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?
by Kon5ole - 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.
by superdisk - 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.
by rozab - 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.
by tombert