Someone having a nice time next to a Red Bull car. Photo via Flickr user Michel Curi
I remember when I was a young teen, I didn't need can after can of Red Bull or Monster to stay up until 5 AM playing computer games where I executed dinosaurs with shotguns; the thrill of a Skypecast with a bunch of people I vaguely knew was enough to keep me going. Now, teenagers are putting away gallons of the stuff, and, as you can imagine, anti-teens-drinking-energy-drink killjoys in the UK are not pleased. They're so displeased, in fact, that they want to ban the sale of it to people under the age of 16.Dr. Shelina Visram from Durham University and Kawther Hashem from the charity Action on Sugar penned a paper stating that the weans are set to up their energy drink intake between now and 2019 by 11 percent. This is bad news, apparently, as energy drinks and the regular consumption of them can supposedly lead to binging on harder stuff like alcohol and, God forbid, drugs.As you well know, most energy drinks exceed the RDA for sugar and caffeine, and for children that threshold is even lower, so their poor little hearts and bowels are surely being melted by these devil beverages. A can of Monster contains 160mg of caffeine and 55g of sugar, which exceeds the official recommendation for kids by about 55mg and 40g respectively. Not great, is it?Hashem of Action on Sugar said, "Children and teenagers are being deceived into drinking large cans of energy drinks, thinking they are going to improve their performance at school, during sports, or even on a night out."Fine, but also, how many kids are drinking Red Bull on "a night out?" Have you ever even met any children?Read: How Much Caffeine Will Kill You?
Advertisement