![]() Just look at the marketing, which is largely tied to sports teams, “extreme” athletics/stunts ( skydiving from the stratosphere!) and television shows popular with male teens and young adults. Also not very shocking is the fact that about 2/3 of overall consumers are male. Not surprisingly, the typical customer looking for an energy drink is young, with 2/3 being between ages of 13 and 35 years. Their popularity is also skyrocketing with a 60% increase in consumption from 2008 to 2012. These are extremely popular beverages, with sales in the United States alone coming in at more than $12.5 billion in 2012. ![]() Unless you have recently emerged from a lengthy coma that began sometime prior to the late 1980’s, then you will have been exposed, likely many thousands of times over just the past few years, to the existence of energy drinks and shots, and the lofty claims made by their manufacturers. What are energy drinks/shots, who drinks them and what’s actually in those things? Energy drinks are dangerous, particularly in young children, and a large part of the blame falls on the shoulders of manufacturers as well as the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act ( DSHEA) so frequently discussed on SBM.īefore I break down the scary numbers from the study, first a little background on energy drinks. The research, which involved the analysis of data obtained from the National Poison Data System for October 2010 through September 2013, supports concerns that pediatricians and other pediatric healthcare professionals have had for a very long time. What finally motivated me to get to work on this topic was the recent spate of media coverage regarding the results of a study presented this week at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2014. I have been planning on addressing in greater detail the intentional, and unfortunately often accidental, ingestion of energy drinks in the pediatric population and the various associated risks for quite a while. In that post, I briefly mentioned the increasing popularity of energy drinks and shots as caffeine delivery devices, and their role as both a potential cause of sleep deprivation and a means of temporarily ameliorating the effects. Fortunately there is a system-wide public health measure proven to work, and now groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics are fully endorsing it. Last month I wrote a post on the causes of poor sleep in adolescents, as well as the myriad problems that can result in this high-risk population.
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