Are Energy Drinks Good For You?
By: Brittany Mapes
Energy drinks are becoming a popular new drink for teens and adults. They are a tangy blend of taurine, guarana, glucose, vitamins, minerals, herb extracts and caffeine. For some people, that can be a life-threatening blend or just a quick boost of energy. Energy drinks can sometimes be confused for a sports drink like Gatorade, but it’s important to not confuse them. If used as an energy boost for sports, you can seriously be hurting your heart. It increases your heart beat, and there has been an incident where a boy drank an energy drink before running his race in track and ended up having a heart attack. Thinking that drinking an energy drink before a work out is a huge mistake, because your blood pressure will go up, and your heart with be over stimulated. Taurine is what hurts your heart. From drinking it, you can have heart irregularities, electrolyte disturbances, and nausea/ vomiting. That kind of makes you want to rethink drinking a Red Bull or Monster, doesn’t it? Also, mixing energy drinks with alcohol, which means a form of medicine, can result in death or serious health problem. Here’s some tips for you if you decide to drink energy drinks: if you engage in to any form of physical activity be sure to hydrate your self with water, when drinking them do not consume large amounts, do not drink them on an empty stomach, if you have hypertension or a heart disease stay away from energy drinks, and a way to avoid having no energy is to have a healthy diet and enough sleep. A lot of people feel super jittery, nervous, and agitated. After all those symptoms, you “crash”. Your whole body feels lethargic and you suddenly feel exhausted. That’s very unhealthy for you and can interfere with your daily plans. The bottom line is that energy drinks aren’t necessarily harmful for you; it just depends on how you use them. The majority of them don’t even live up to their expectations. If you do decide to drink them, use caution!
If you go to http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine/ you can enter your favorite kind of energy drink and see how many cans it’ll take to seriously harm your body so that you can see how easy it is to be harmed by a can full of “energy”.
