Every day we see the news; economies crashing, underpaid labor, and students juggling jobs and education. People find it challenging to balance their plates with all these responsibilities, and so, amongst all this chaos, they naturally tend to gravitate towards external solutions. With already such busy and stressful lives, they find it hard to incorporate healthy habits to deal with their fatigue and prefer quick fixes such as energy drinks. They desperately claw at a chance to boost productivity to deal with their fast-paced lives, but do energy drinks help to do so? Or is it simply a byproduct of the mass-marketing of the ‘benefits’ of energy drinks by influential corporate companies?
I’m sure all of you are familiar with slogans such as ‘Red Bull gives you wings.’ Enticing, isn’t it? The phrase sparks curiosity in individuals and makes them want to try whatever magical product these companies offer to fix their daily issues. Perhaps one may ignore such claims the first few times, but after seeing them plastered on every TV, billboard, and newspaper, our minds start believing them, regardless of how authentic they may be. But how many of us have genuinely researched these drinks we so readily consume? Do these claims have any substance to them or not?
And so this brings us to the main question, why have energy drinks become so popular in the last decade? Is it because of their outstanding results? Or is it because they prey on the weakness of the easily influenced public? We will answer all of these questions and more in this article. By the end of this article, we promise you will be able to decide whether Red Bull gives you wings.
Many well-known companies entice the consumer with outwardly healthy-looking and trendy ingredients such as taurine, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12. But delving deeper into the composition of the drinks, you realize these ingredients may as well not exist. And even if they do, they have little significance as they already naturally exist in our daily diet. Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room; caffeine. Caffeine is marketed as the hero by every company, claiming to magically fix all your performance-related issues. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: caffeine has no ability to provide energy, it is a stimulant. What a push does is block our brain from receiving the “tired” signals, making it feel like we have newfound energy.
However, once the effects of the stimulants have worn off, the person who has used them will feel more fatigued because the brain will be bombarded with ‘tired’ signals. Following this, the person who had used the energy drink will need to drink it again. Therefore, drinking them would lure you into a vicious circle of consumption.
Among the frequently found ingredients are amino acids and sweeteners. Talking about amino acids, companies claim that they speed up muscle recovery. Compared to the protein that we consume, amino acids are insignificant for this function. Many studies have found no significant evidence that the minuscule amount found in energy drinks affects us— we already get the necessary amino acids from our diet. Since these drinks are marketed towards athletes, they try to stray from unnecessary calories. Sweeteners act as a non-caloric substitute for sugars. As the name suggests, they only offer sweetness, not actual energy that comes from glucose. And so, while there may not be sugar to provide us energy, the combined effect of caffeine as a stimulant and the addictive sweetness of sweeteners, certainly make it feel so.
Therefore, Red Bull doesn’t truly give us wings. When we skim over the ingredients of most commercial energy drinks like XS Citrus Blast or Impulse, the true provider of energy, sugar, is non-existent. These drinks can only provide the consumer with the illusion of it, generally through caffeine. This, along with other myths (better known as market ploys), can easily be debunked with a bit of research. For instance, some advertisements claim that their drink improves performance; however, better performance is not necessarily linked to glucose consumption. The performance in question is left vague on purpose; it could either mean mental or physical performance. These marketing tactics also give way to placebo effects, which make exercise seem easier or less tiring when it’s all in the athlete’s mentality.
To conclude, most energy drinks aren’t all they claim to be— they don’t contain the most effective nutrients that give us energy. The best ingredients we’ve seen are amino acids, which do have positive effects, but only when you’re deficient in them and your only source of them is energy drinks. The sweeteners provide nothing but flavoring, hence the name. Coke, with its high sugar content, could theoretically do a better job at energizing. But if you’re up for the jittery-caffeine-induced type of not-so-energy energy, energy drinks are your best bet.
