How Many Energy Drinks is Too Many?

Music. And welcome to Change Your Relationship with Food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley.

With many years' experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing. I had a really interesting patient this week. I thought I'd heard and seen most things over the years, but occasionally something comes along that's a bit different and it's something I've not heard before. It's quite rare.

This gentleman was presenting for bariatric surgery. He was due to have surgery and he got sent to me beforehand. I see people twice normally before they have surgery to discuss their eating up to that point, also to talk about their lifestyle and how the surgery will fit with that lifestyle and to give them an idea of what to expect afterwards, et cetera, et cetera.

So anyway, it was the first time I'd met this man and I like to get an idea of their relationship with food prior to coming for surgery. What prompted that decision? What's their relationship with food been up to that point. And he started telling me about certain periods each year where he will just go without food completely. And this is a man that weighs about 200 kilos. So that's about 440 pounds. So he's in a body that needs, it's got a fairly high calorie requirement for

it, just to keep his body running as it is. So. He goes sometimes for five weeks without eating anything, anything at all. And how he survives during that period of time is he lives on energy drinks and he consumes, he said, about eight to 10 energy drinks over the day, but zero food. I want to tell you straight up before any part of your brain goes to thinking that this could be a good idea.

This is not a good idea. I'm going to explain why, but please, please, please do not see this as some sort of new amazing diet that I'm introducing. It is not. And he is actually at serious risk of something called refeeding syndrome. Refeeding syndrome happens normally in the context of anorexia, where someone has been getting either no food or a very, very small amount of food over a period of time. What happens over that time is your body has to make certain adjustments.

And then if you suddenly start to eat again at a normal level, the body can't adjust back quickly enough. that's refeeding syndrome in its simplest terms. So basically somebody who's malnourished, so that means their body is deprived of nutrients and has been for a while, they say that anything over seven days can evoke refeeding syndrome. So you don't have to go that long without nutrients for this to occur. And then when your body tries to metabolize nutrients again.

So when you start eating, severe shifts happened, mostly related to electrolyte deficiencies. And these basically affect your body's chemistry and they can cause really, really dangerous complications. They affect your muscles, your lungs, your heart, your brain, and could quite seriously result in death. So I know when our dietician first met this gentleman, she gave him a lot of really, really stern warnings, which he was laughing off.

But when I saw him, I reinforced those very warnings to say, she was right to be concerned because this is not something that your body is designed to tolerate.

But it did make me think. About this diet that he'd adopted. And one of my first questions, because I get more time with the patients to ask them the whys and their sort of motivation behind things. And I said to him about this way that he deals with food. Why? Where did you discover this? What on earth led you to think that this was a good idea. And he put it down to, I suppose, laziness. He said, I can't be bothered eating. I can't eat at work.

It's a distraction and they don't really allow me to have breaks. And he was going through a tough time in his life and he decided to throw himself into work to distract himself from the tough time. And what it resulted in is working really, really long hours and not eating. And he was of this belief that if he was lacking energy, well, what could he do but have an energy drink? I mean, duh, it's in the title, isn't it? The belief is that these drinks give you energy.

So if you've had insomnia, for instance, if you wake up in the morning and you go, oh, I've only had a couple of hours sleep, what do I need? I need energy.

And quite a few people go for an energy drink. I have seen people having these for breakfast. On the drive to work, when I've pulled up at traffic lights and I've looked over, there'll be somebody sitting on a bench, maybe, in the middle of town, drinking an energy drink for breakfast. I can't think of anything worse personally, but each to their own. But I'm sure on some level that person has said, I'm tired, I need energy, what do I do?

And they go for what they see as a quick fix, an energy drink. So what are these things? Well, they've not been around forever, but they have been around for quite a long time. In the modern age, if you like, the modern interpretation of the energy drink, the first name to enter this picture was Red Bull. They came along in 1987. And since then, energy drinks have, the popularity of them has grown and grown and grown.

So, I wanted to just throw a few of these names at you because even the names of these energy drinks are designed to evoke certain feelings. So, things like Red Bull, V, Mother, Monster Energy, Rockstar. What do they all suggest? They all suggest this high energy, maybe high achieving. They suggest fun. They suggest power. They suggest quite a few kind of links with sports, that sort of thing.

And when you look at the marketing of these energy drinks, the marketing is really, really towards young people and particularly males consume more energy drinks than females do. So, they're directed at young people and that is the main age group that consumes energy drink. However, people that are consumers of energy drink regularly are getting younger and younger and younger. So, now we've got a market of people regularly having.

These energy drinks, having these regular doses of high caffeine, because most of the energy in the energy drink comes from the sugar and the caffeine content.

So what we're doing is giving young people and sometimes very young people from the age of eight, access to high doses of sugar and caffeine when their cognitive function is still developing. So we have to ask ourselves, What effect does this have? I know in some countries, there's warnings on these cans for people under 15 not to consume them. Sometimes there's limits and legislation around what can and can't be sold, but not in every country.

The energy, as I say, comes from sugar and caffeine. That's the main sources. Some of these drinks claim to do all sorts of other things like strengthen muscles or offer endurance and things like that. But in reality, there's little evidence to actually support those claims. But a lot of people genuinely that I speak to genuinely do say they feel energized after one of these drinks. Now, if that's from the sugar, then we know with sugar, our body metabolizes it very, very quickly.

It's one of the first and easiest things, especially something like a simple carbohydrate, very, very easy for our body to metabolize and convert. That happens almost immediately. And what you get is that sugar rush, that boost of energy that comes on board. But unfortunately, that energy from sugar, if it's got nothing to sustain it. Diminishes very quickly. So these drinks are kind of self-perpetuating. You're going to get that sugar high.

Then you're going to get a dip where your blood sugar actually drops. And then what happens is you have a sugar craving and you feel actually quite low in energy. So for a lot of people, they grab another energy drink, just like the gentleman I was telling you that's come for surgery. He was surviving on about 10 of these a day. So when he felt his energy go down, he would have another energy drink to bring the energy back up again.

We've also got caffeine on board in quite large quantities with these drinks as well. So a lot of people claim there is a physical effect, which there may well be. But also you've got to think, is part of this effect... The placebo effect, is it psychological? Is it the belief that I've just finished a can of whatever it is, a can of Mother, a can of V, a can of Red Bull, I should feel energised by now.

And because we feel we should feel that way, we do in fact start to feel that way, especially because we've invested money in this product. We expect to feel that way. We anticipate feeling that way. And it's almost like we want to prove to ourselves that we were right. Our purchase was correct. We did the right thing. We got the result that we paid for. So quite often, I think there might be a bit of a placebo effect attached to these as well.

So let's look at the caffeine and let's look at the sugar. So the safe amount, apparently, of caffeine that we can have over the day is 400 milligrams, which equals about four cups of coffee. That's supposed to be the safe level of caffeine that we have. If we have any more than that, then there are risks associated with it or adverse effects associated with it. They can include things like nervousness, irritability, sleeplessness.

So the irony is a lot of times people are consuming a lot of caffeine during the day. They're not sleeping very well. They wake up fatigued and guess what? They go, oh, I need a coffee or I need an energy drink to get me going again. So again, we've got that sort of cyclic behavior pattern happening where you've got cause and effect.

So sleeplessness can be in there. And things like, things that are quite serious, like abnormal heart rhythms or indigestion, reflux, these are all associated with higher levels of caffeine and also things like anxiety.

So mental health issues as well can be associated with this. So per 500 mils, so comparing like for like here. I just want to run through what you can expect for these drinks, because you probably either don't look at the labels of these, or in some countries, actually, there's no legislation to make you read the label, because there is no nutritional label on these drinks. So, per 500 mils, Red Bull, you're looking at 160 milligrams of caffeine.

So, remember that the safe limit was 400 milligrams per day. So 160 milligrams, just in 500 mils of Red Bull. We've also got 54 grams of sugar. So 13 and a half teaspoons of sugar in that 500 mils of Red Bull. That's quite a lot of sugar when you think about it. It's the same for Monster, exactly the same profile, exactly the same amount of caffeine and sugar.

If you move to something like Rockstar, a different brand of drink, you've got the same 160 milligrams of caffeine, but this time 62 grams of sugar. So 15 and a half teaspoons of sugar. So I also searched for what had the highest caffeine content, and it was prime energy drink at 200 milligrams. So you only have to have two of those during the day to start to be over your caffeine limit. I didn't look up the sugar for that one, but I imagine that the sugar's huge as well.

So the profiles of these things is not great. And you've got to think that's what they are. They're sugar and they're caffeine, pretty much. There's nothing else going on in that drink that's going to give you much nutritional value, despite some of the claims, despite some of the things that they say are in it and the health benefits. When you look at the actual evidence, there's no real evidence to support those claims.

So let's take those with a little bit of a pinch of salt. We have to think about these things and maybe be a little bit more mindful of what we consume. Because it's very easy to drink a can of one of these. It's fine if you're doing it occasionally, that's not a drama. But if you live your life reliant on an energy drink to keep you going in the morning and another one to keep you going mid-morning, and then you find you need one with your lunch, and then lo and behold,

you have an energy slump in the afternoon and you go, oh, you know what? I need an energy drink. If life is getting like that for you, you really have to think about, is your behavior led by your lack of energy or is your lack of energy actually being led by the energy drink? Which is the horse? Which is the cart in this scenario.

Because quite often, the only solution to breaking this habit is to go cold turkey and actually find out what's going on naturally in your body when it's not affected by all these stimulants. What else is going on underneath the artificial stimulants that you're putting in there? Now, there is excessive and aggressive marketing around this because big money is involved. Billions and billions of dollars every year is what the energy drink market accounts for.

Even major drinks manufacturers like Coca-Cola, once they realized that there was money to be made in energy drinks, they diversified. They developed their own energy drinks. So a lot of these companies that were producing products. Soft drinks beforehand or sodas, they diversified because, ka-ching, this is where the money was. This is something else, something different we can sell.

Because if people are moving away from straight soft drinks or sodas into energy drinks, and the energy drinks are selling more and holding more of the market value, well, the company that produced the soft drinks is going to move with them, isn't it? So there's a lot of money invested in this. But at the end of the day, these people are investing money in selling a product.

They're not investing money in your health. Please don't be fooled by thinking that any of these things are healthy for you. They're going to make you live longer. They're going to help you be a better person, or they're going to do anything to your body which is beneficial. You can get the same nutrients, you can get the same energy from food. It can be done. Maybe, though, it just doesn't come as a conveniently packaged can that makes

you look a certain way in front of your friends. Maybe it's a bit more difficult than that. But in the long run, these are the things we need to be looking at if we want a healthy body for a long time. The problem is the main consumers of these products are quite young, at a stage where their body copes well, it recovers, it bounces back.

Trust me, your body won't bounce back forever. Once you get a bit older and you start to realise that your body has a finite amount of health and energy and vitality on board that does run out sometimes, then you have to start to think more carefully.

So I hope that's helped you think a little about this. Don't take my word for this stuff. Jump on the internet. Google things. Have a look at the can you're drinking. Have a look at the nutritional content. Have a look what's in it. What's it telling you as far as the daily recommended intake that you might be having for that product?

Read and be a wise consumer. And as long as you consume something, knowing what you're consuming, knowing what you're getting into, knowing what's going into your body, then absolutely it's completely your decision to make. But don't be uninformed. Just inform yourself about what you're consuming. Until next week, my friends, I will speak to you then. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Don't forget to check the links in the episode notes to our six-week Change Your Relationship with Food course, and to the Change Your Relationship with Food workbook and journal, which is available on Amazon. Music.