I’ve been having a serious reflection about this particular
project. I spoke with my friends the other day and we wound up on the topics of
politics. Healthcare, legalized discrimination, the way the army lets veterans
slip through the cracks, our stalled Congress and House of Representatives,
that kind of stuff. I usually avoid politics because I’m woefully ignorant
about it. But hearing my friend rattle off unnerving fact after fact kind of
shook me.
So what have I been learning about in the past two weeks of
this blog? How to sew, cook, and clean? Moaning about how I don’t have time for
hobbies? Underwear? Holding a mirror up to my interests has made me feel rather
shallow of late. I know I should learn something every day, but shouldn’t I be
learning something important every
day? Something that would actually improve me as a person rather than just
being a fact cluttering the closet of my brain? I can have days for learning
parkour terms and music websites. But that should be balanced with learning
about history and politics, the sciences and arts. And you know what? Why wait?
Here’s a post about the topic I’m researching for my stats class- how energy
drinks might actually be evil.
First of all, there is such a thing as caffeine
intoxication. It’s in the DSM IV and everything. It can happen if you about 250 mg of caffeine. That’s
about 5-6 cups of black tea, 3 cups of coffee, and for some energy drinks or
shots, just one will get you there. Then the symptoms start, ranging from jitteriness
and stomach aches to more serious ones like muscle twitching, rambling
thoughts, and uncontrollable movements. But one of the most important criteria
of the current DSM is that it impairs your abilities, like if suddenly in class
you can’t concentrate on the lecture. (Yeah, I think I must have been the case
for me a few days ago.)
But I’ve
been recently looking at energy drink research and found there’s a troubling
trend that goes deeper than being twitchy for an afternoon. One of the articles
I read was called “Energy Drinks, Race, and Problem Behaviors Among College
Students” by Dr. Kathleen Miller, and she found that white college students who
consumed energy drinks tended to engage in more risky behavior. This includes
legal and illegal drug use, driving while under the influence or letting
someone else who is drunk drive them, and sexual risk taking. Here’s the take
home message in her own words:
“Frequent
consumers [those who had energy drinks 6 or more days a month] reported
drinking and having alcohol-related problems more than twice as often as less
frequent consumers or non-consumers, and were approximately three times as
likely to have smoked cigarettes, abused prescription drugs, been in a serious
physical fight, or done something risky on a dare in the year prior to the
survey.”
-Miller,
493
Now this isn’t to say that drinking Monster makes you
stupid. These drinks are targeted towards a demographic that might just take
more risks than other college students. They’re usually sold as “X-TREME ENERGY
FOR BADASSES ONLY”. One drink is straight up called “cocaine”! So people might be lumping energy drinks along
with other “extreme” actions such as doing a stupid dare or doing other drugs. As
is often stated in science, correlation does not equal causation. We can’t say whether
people do stupid shit because they drink monster, or if they drink monster
because they do stupid shit.
This isn’t even touching the physical aspect of this issue.
It has been suspected that these things could harm your heart, and definitely have
way too much caffeine for pregnant women and children. Not to mention the
horror stories that happen when you mix an energy drink with alcohol (which a
disturbingly large number of college students do). Four Loko was banned in some
states for a reason. Not only are there more heart problems, but it makes you
think you’re less impaired than you really are and reduces the negative symptoms
of drinking. Think of the worst case scenario. Someone doesn’t notice the signs
of the body telling them “for the love of god, stop drinking!” and consume
more. Then they might think that they’re ok to drive at the end of the night
because they’re not tired. This doesn’t happen every time someone drinks a
vodka and red bull, but even one time is too much.
We know alcohol is bad for you. We know smoking is bad for
you. But it’s unnerving to know that there’s a product on our shelves that
MIGHT be bad for you, but we’re not sure. If anyone is looking for a research
proposal like me, why not study a drug that hundreds of thousands of young
adults drink every week? I myself am curious as to how my research paper goes
and what I’ll learn by the end of it.
oh, and because I'm a good scientist:
Miller, K. (2008). Energy drinks, race, and problem behaviors among college students. Journal of Adolescent Health 43, 490–497
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