Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with energy drinks?

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Chuck hates them, Josh has flirted with them. Energy drinks. Listen in to learn all about this canned speed. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Are you all hopped up? I used to be, man. I used to drink energy drinks a lot. I think I remember that.

Especially, I would definitely drink at least one before we would go on stage. That's right. And I could tell a big difference between not doing that and doing that for sure. Yeah, so I just want to caveat all this. I don't want to sound like a Debbie Downer with how I talk about energy drinks. I find them disgusting. Like the taste or like the whole concept? The taste, absolutely.

Not for me. I don't even really drink soda ever. Oh, yeah. It's like a couple of coaxies, maybe, and a couple of Fana oranges, maybe a root beer, like six or seven. I've talked about this before. So obviously, if I'm not even into soda, really, an energy drink flavor-wise, it's a lot for my tender taste buds.

But I'm also just not a caffeine hound. And I know a lot of people really maybe depend on this stuff or enjoy it and like to be in energized in that way. But it's just not my style. I don't like the heart racing feeling. I don't like feeling ganked up. It's just not my personality. So if I do sound a little like energy drink, like a little thumbs downy, then that's kind

of where that's coming from. It's just not my bag to each his own. Don't want to yuck someone's yum. So we will get into the whether or not they're good for you, obviously. But I just want to caveat this episode with that. Yeah. We're not going to let this one turn into the vaping episode. How about that?

I don't even remember what we said in that one. We poo-pooed every bit of it. It did, didn't we? Yes, quite overtly. It's kind of playing out though now, right? It is because I can tell you just anecdotally, I'm seeing way more people smoking cigarettes these days than I did five, 10 years ago. Oh, really?

Are you going back to cigarettes or? Yeah. That was the whole problem with vaping. It was like people who had never smoked were like, oh, vaping's good for you. I'll try that. And then they're like, I wonder what these cigarettes are like, and now they're hooked on cigarettes. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. Or the vapors were like, oh, it's not so awesome to just puff huge clouds of coconut pineapple flavored garbage. Chemistry. It's gross. Yeah. All right. So energy drinks, right?

Yeah. They bring up the vape episode not just because of that, but because energy drinks do kind of bear like a weird similarity to it. There's a lot of chemistry going on. There's a lot of unproven claims, and yet people are definitely into them. There's no denying it. And I won't yuck anybody's yom either. I don't really drink them much anymore, but I do enjoy when occasionally when I have more

to do than usual on a particular day, right? Okay. But I'd say we start out with the history of energy drinks, which I mean, you can make a case that Coca-Cola was an energy drink when it had cocaine in it, but energy drinks as we understand them today actually start background 1949 in Tennessee of all places. Right. This is in Johnson City, Tennessee. The first, well, I don't know about the first, but it was, well, it definitely wasn't the

first, but it was a part of the early medicinal soda trends that was going on back then along with Coke. And we're talking about Dr. Enough, E-N-U-F, which started in 49 with, it was basically like a soda, but they had some potassium and some B vitamins thrown in, and it was and still is still around. It's hard to find, but you can find it here and there in certain Southern States. But it's not everywhere. Like I've never really seen it on shelves.

I've never even heard of it. Oh, really? Yeah. I haven't seen it on shelves in Georgia, but I think it's marketed as sort of like one of those like old kind of tonic elixir sort of things. Gotcha. So okay. So that's established as the beachhead of possibly the first energy drink.

What really kind of takes that mantle and runs with it is something called Lipovitan D. That's how I'm pronouncing it. Great name for a marketable drink. Yeah. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And yeah, it sounds like it would taste really awful. And apparently it did, but it came out of Japan because back in the 50s when it came out, Japan was like super into working 14 or 16 hours during the day, eating, standing

up in like five minutes and then getting back to work. Like basically everything like if you ever saw, what was that auto maker movie with Michael Keaton? Gungho. Yes. Gungho, like that caricature of Japanese business, it's not entirely just completely stereotypical. It's not based on just nothing. You know what I mean?

Yeah, but this was in the 50s when methamphetamines were, pre-1953 in Japan at least, were legal. And like there were all kinds of like fine, upstanding citizens across the world eating uppers basically to get more done and they, you know, like I said, they weren't illegal at the time. I think there weren't people out there screaming about ill health effects. So all they knew was this was go juice and I can get a lot more done. And they, they certainly, at least in part helped fuel that kind of 1950s Japanese business work ethic.

Yeah. It also helped Jack Kerouac right on the road in like 48 hours on a single long sheet of paper, as I understand. 100%. So the Japanese were into amphetamine like most of the world was at that time. But then the narcotics and psychotropics control act was passed in that, in that country. And they said, no more methamphetamines, everybody, you're getting out of hand. And so the, the Taisho Pharmaceutical Company said, we can't use speed anymore, but I suspect

that people are going to really want something that, that makes them feel that way. So let's come up with an elixir and that elixir that they came up with was lipovitandy. That's right. And it was initially served as a pill that had something called tarion in it, which is derived from, originally from ox bile, but they synthesized it, you know, a long, long time ago. And we'll, we'll talk about what that is more, but it's a key ingredient in modern energy drinks.

But they made that into a liquid. They served it in a little glass bottle called an ampule, and it had a little membrane and you could stick a straw through it and it became kind of the go-to, and it was small. It was sort of, if you've ever seen a five hour energy, it was kind of that size. It looked like. Yeah. And Japan was like, this is great. I don't know why you took the pill and turned it into some disgusting tasting like liquid

that we have to drink, but we like it probably because it hit you a lot faster. That's what I'm guessing. And then there was a guy who was running that company at the time, the Taisho Pharmaceutical Company that was making lipovitane D and he said, you know what, let's make this taste here. Let's add some flavoring. Let's add more of like a soda feel to it. And that is when it really started to take off.

And that is, in 1962, what you would consider probably the first modern precursor of a genuine energy drink as we'd recognize them today. Yeah. And a couple of decades went by and then in 1985, Jolt Cola came along, which was invented by a gentleman named CJ RAP. It was highly marketed as a, just a super caffeinated cola. What was the slogan? It was like all the sugar twice the caffeine.

That's right. And it had 72 milligrams of caffeine and I think in a Coke somewhere between 50 and 60. Wait, how many milligrams of caffeine? Jolt had 72. Oh, okay. All right. I thought you said 700 for a second.

No, 72, which is, you know, 10 to 20-ish milligrams more than like an average soda, I think, which isn't like a ton. But at the time, he called it Jolt. It had the lightning bolt and this was at a time in the mid-80s when less was more in like, you know, fewer calories, fewer caffeine, like kind of less everything. And so it really swam against the current as far as a kind of a marketing thing. Right. I used to love that stuff and I don't know if you remember, but we mentioned it before

on the show and they sent us some Jolt. Oh, really? I don't remember. I don't know if I even tried it, to be honest. Oh, well, it tastes like cola that's super sweet and really gets you going. I mean, it's still around, I think, too, right? Yeah, I just, I hadn't seen it in forever, so I was really happy that they sent some. But 84, if you jump back a year, is kind of when, if you think about American-style energy

drinks, was the birth of that movement. Yeah, because, I mean, Jolt Cola is like all in fun. It's about being hyper, that kind of thing. But it's not like, it's not like a drink that's designed to give you, like, a form of energy that you can be productive with or increase your performance with. And that seems to be, like, the baseline point of energy drinks. And that really finds, well, I guess a lip of IT&D really fits that bill. But the one that we would recognize today that started in 84 was found by a German toothpaste

marketer named Dietrich Matteschitz, and he was hanging out in Thailand at the time, and he came across a tonic syrup called Kretting Deng. It wasn't that, like, my context messed up and I couldn't see. Like I wish you could have seen my face, because I bet it was hilarious. Oh, man, that was great. Can we get that in there? That pause? Sure.

All right. Kretting Deng. Deng. All right. So what does that mean, Chuck? How about this? Why don't we take a break and we'll talk about a cliffhanger, and we'll tell you what that means right after this.

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These are the details people want to hear. I don't know about that, but sure. All right. So where we left off was in 1984, Dietrich Matyschitz was marketing for toothpaste, was hanging out in Thailand, discovered the tonic syrup called Kratting Dang. And that was developed in the mid-70s. And if you want to translate that into English, that means what? No, I'd set you up for it.

You take it. It means red bull. Yeah. And you might say, oh, okay, red bull, but where'd the red bull come from? Its origin story is even more complete than we've led on because the red bull refers to Torine, which is, again, named after bulls, Taurus is the bull. And the reason why it seemed after bulls is because it was first extracted from ox bile, which is awesome.

Right. So if you ever heard, I kind of remember early on in Red Bull's life when people would kind of spread the urban legend that there was like bull urine and stuff like that in it, and that's how it's derived. I remember that. Yeah, I totally do. Obviously, none of that is true. It may have had something to do with the ox bile origin.

Surely. Yeah, I'm guessing so. And the fact that there was trace amounts of bull semen in there. No. Just not bull urine. That's crazy. But like we said, that had been synthesized for decades, so it's not like they were using real ox bile anyway.

Right, exactly. So Dietrich Matteschitz, who, he went from marketing Blendax toothpaste to taking this tonic, the red bull tonic, cretang dang, cretang dang, just can't quite get it. And he said, I want to do something with this. I think people are going to go crazy for this. So he got his hands on a license. He spent three years turning it into a carbonated beverage rather than just a tonic syrup, messed with the taste, came up with a great marketing plan, and launched it in 1987 in Austria and

Germany to great success. Yeah, he sold a lot of it. Early, just kind of from the beginning, Red Bull had a very guerrilla style marketing thing as far as those cars that you see that are, I don't know, say, wrapped in Red Bull ads and... Had the can on them? Yeah, and like Red Bull parties and stuff like that. They had animated TV commercials over there that were really catchy.

And it really caught on not only there, but it obviously worked its way through Europe, but it eventually found its way to the US where it became tied to car racing and extreme sports. And you and I even did that, was it like a soapbox derby where we were called upon to judge the soapbox derby, right? Who was it? Was it Young Jock? I think so.

It was a rapper that was with us. And like a couple other people. Nice guy. Oh, he was great. I don't remember who else was up there. But yeah, it was... That was a weird thing, but that was a Red Bull event. And they sponsored a lot of those kind of things.

And that was, you know, they were marketing to younger people who, you know, Red Bull gives you wings and sort of like the extreme sports angle. They sponsored that jump, the highest jump from the stratosphere ever done by, oh man, I can't remember the guys name, I want to say Casper or something. Do you remember that? Casper Weinberger? No, no. Like you never jumped out of an orbiting satellite like this guy did.

Right, right, right. Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, so that was a Red Bull sponsored thing. That's definitely like up their alley for sure. So interesting advertising that it's like, oh, you're going to... Anything where people have eyeballs on it, they're like, well, can we put our logo on your chest? Mm-hmm.

I guess it makes sense. I mean, that's... I don't know. It does. It's like that guy who, the airline pilot who landed the plane safely in the Hudson and no one died like a few years back. Did they sponsor him? No, he wasn't sponsored, but he took that spotlight and he used it to basically share

with the public the plight of like airline pilots and how they're mistreated. And it's the same thing. It's like a bunch of people are paying attention to you all of a sudden. Are you going to say, I'm sponsored by Red Bull or my colleagues are really being mistreated by the airline companies? Let's do something about it. Right. And I'm not poo-pooing it.

Obviously, the irony is not lost on me. I know that's how we make our living, so please save your emails. We're always walking around with Red Bull jackets on. The leather eight-ball Red Bull jackets that we're contractually obligated to wear. But Red Bull was a pretty big success right away, held a lot of the market, like the line share of the market share early on in the early 2000s, I think 70 to 90% in 2001 of the market share. And obviously, when something is selling one and a half plus billion cans of something

a year, people are going to jump on board. And then you got one, two, three, basically four other really big players who stuck around. Yeah. Monster, which is a juggernaut, it was actually launched by, you know that Hanson soda, the all-natural soda? I don't think I do. You've seen it. If you've ever been to a decent deli before, they have Hanson soda along with New York

Seltzer and stuff. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like little soda brand that just keeps plugging along, but it's like touts that it's made of natural ingredients. They launched Monster. And they went from in 2003, a company with $50 million in revenue, they launched Monster Energy Drink that year. And eight years later, they were making $1.7 billion in revenue.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, they have about a third of today's market. There's NOS, which I see those signs all over convenience stores, but honestly, I never really paid attention enough to know what it was, but that is an energy drink. It was launched in 2005 by FUzefuse, which was bought by Coke. And I think Monster owns them now as well, right? Yeah.

They own the number two and number three best-selling energy drinks. I've also seen it pronounced NOS. NOS, it probably is. Yeah. That's how little I know about car racing. Well, I had to look up a video where somebody reviewed it to make sure that's how you say it. So I'm with you.

But it's like a nitrous oxide booster. Like that part in Black Sheep, when Chris Farley and David Spader are driving the stolen police car and they're tailed by real police and he pushes the nitrous oxide button and just takes off because it injects a bunch of combustion into it and really gets it going, that's basically the premise of this energy drink. I still haven't seen that movie. It's okay. It's pretty good.

All right. Then you've got, of course, Rockstar. That was launched in 01. That is owned by Pepsi and you see a trend here with any beverage, any beer. If you're some kind of cool small brand that's selling a lot of stuff, one of the big dogs will come along and gobble you up pretty quickly and I think that's the goal for a lot of these companies is like a big payday. Apparently Rockstar is kind of going down in the market.

Right? Yeah. Year by year. So apparently it's a discount energy drink. It's about half the price of Monster but they have a very limited amount of flavors and I think that's the way you make money in that biz is like having 50 million flavors. Half the price, half the flavor. That's their logo?

That used to be mine. I used to like Rockstar a lot and it was like, it just wasn't nearly as noxious as some of the other ones are but yeah, it's fine. And then you've got your five. Plus you can't beat the price. When you got your five hour energy, that's the one I mentioned earlier. You will see these little guys. It's like a shot basically by the cash register area because they're not refrigerated and

they were launched in 2004 by Living Essentials and this was kind of harkens back a little more to those Asian elixir tonics that were sold in the early days in the 60s. Right. And one reason that the big players in the soda market started buying up energy drinks smaller companies is because their own attempts at them were almost across the board failures. Coke Energy was probably the longest lasting one and they just announced, they think this past year that they were going to stop making it. And never even heard of it.

You could have very easily looked past it was like a thin can that they, if you weren't looking for an energy drink, you could have gone your whole life without knowing it existed. Vault, which was, I was sad to see that go, I used to love that stuff, but it was a little more along the lines of like Jolt's vibe than like an energy drink vibe. Okay. Do you remember that stuff that used to fuel me in the early days of recording? Yeah, I remember Vault. Okay.

I don't remember Pepsi's Josta, never heard of that. Me either. What else? And I don't remember Nelly, the rapper Nelly had pimp juice, I don't remember that. Well, I mean, there's plenty of others too, Chuck. There's more than you can shake a stick at apparently in 2006 and 2007, 200 new brands were introduced and you've got, you just, there's tons of different brands and some of them are kind of like still tapping into that early like extreme vibe.

Like there's one called Red Line Extreme. Then the others are like kind of like going after niche markets, one's called Nerd Focus and then Sunny D has gotten into it with their RISE, R-Y-S-E energy drink. I can't believe there's not a Z in that. There's not. I think they were satisfied with the Y instead of the I. Like you can't bastardize two letters. Exactly.

They're like, we're Sunny D, we can only go so far. And then also there's Bang. I think there's people who are energy drink fans who are screaming at us right now. You can't not mention Bang, at least if we're going to buzz market all these guys. Sure. I think it's about muscle buzz, that's a good one. Is that for real or are you making that up? It's made it up.

Oh, because I could see it both ways. It totally could be a real thing. No, I'm sure there are still smaller brands out there. Like you said, that they have their loyalists. But whenever you're talking about something like this, it seems to boil down to like four or five kind of the big boys. And big boys is right because I think a couple of years ago, the global market was about $45 billion total.

And this is, Ed Grabinowski helped us out with this one. He does point out that like statistically, if you look at like the Wall Street Journal, they'll talk about Europe and Russia and North America. But those are just because they're traded publicly. I'm sure that in Asia they still have some of the hot selling smaller tonics that just aren't publicly listed like that. Right. At least not on the New York Stock Exchange.

No. Who needs it? So you said in 2020 it was worth $45 billion, right? Yeah. I saw predicted by 2031, less than a decade from now, it'll reach $108 billion. Wow. And 90% of that will go toward nerd focus. That's my prediction.

We should talk about what's in these things, right? Yeah. First and foremost, Chuck, is sugar, sugar, sugar. Yeah. You're very sweet. And that's probably why, like I like sugar, I like ice cream and desserts and things. Yeah. Just get a bag down from the counter and a spoon and then go.

I don't love sugary, really sugary drinks though, as evidenced by my lack of cola consumption. I think that may be one of my biggest turnoffs out of the gate is just how sweet they are. Yeah. Man, you're really doing yourself a favor by avoiding that stuff. I mean, I already have a weight problem. Can you imagine if I drank like six or eight sodas a day? I wouldn't be around. That's the easiest way to drop a bunch of weight if that's what you're looking for is

dropping like putting soda. And apparently also, I can't back this up with any study, but anecdotally speaking, zero sugar or diet is just as bad if not worse somehow that we don't fully understand yet. Yeah. Emily used to be a diet coke fiend and totally gave it up probably, I don't know, six or eight years ago. Good for her. It's a big difference in her life, you know?

Yeah. I believe it. So sugar wise, a 16 ounce energy drink has about 50 to 60 grams of sugar. That's a lot. That is a lot. If you look at the same size, coke has about 39. So this is upwards of 20 plus grams of sugar more than a coke. Yeah.

So they're very sweet. What's interesting is like the, I guess the taste of them. Some of them, you're like, this is really sweet, but like Red Bull, for example, has a ton of sugar in it, but that's not the thing that you notice. That's not the chief part of like the taste or the mouth feel. It's something different, but there's a ton of sugar in there. And sugar, the reason why there's a lot of sugar in there is because carbohydrates like sugar that are easily broken down do provide you energy.

That's one of the things that they do. And so energy drinks have said, well, we'll just put a ton of sugar in here to start. Yeah. Honestly, Red Bull is the only one I've ever even tasted. And as soon as they did, I was like, this is not for me. So I've never even had any of the other ones. The other ones can be really sweet and not like Red Bull at all. Yeah.

Caffeine is the next huge ingredient. Obviously, all of these are going to have at least 150 grams of caffeine, which sounds like a lot and it is. But I think, I mean, how much is like a large coffee has usually more than 300, right? Not a large choc, a grande has 310. Is grande the large or the medium? It's the medium. Okay.

Yeah. There's tall grande and venti. Oh, right, right. It's the big one. But yeah, so it's like, you know, of course coffee has a bunch in it, but a 16 ounce soda has like 50 to 60 grams of it, right? And some of these, you know, 160 is a good average from what I saw, 160 grams of caffeine in like a 16 ounce, like one of those tall boy cans of an energy drink.

So there's a lot more than there is in soda, but not quite as much in coffee. The thing is, some of those energy drinks do go up to like 300. Like I know Bang has 300 grams of caffeine in it. So basically double the average caffeine that you'll find in other energy drinks. And that's just the listed stuff. As we'll see, there are, from what I can tell, depending on what it's regulated as, no requirements for listing how much caffeine is in it. And if they are required to list how much caffeine is in it, they only have to put the

amount of caffeine that they're actually putting in. Like caffeine powder that was synthesized in a lab that they put into their drink. That's the only stuff that they would need to list. And there's a lot of other caffeine sources in it. I just don't see how that could still be possible. Because the FDA is just totally owned by everybody but the American people. That's why. It's just sad.

And we've done episodes on that. It does the FDA protect Americans. The really eye-opening one we did on supplements, you remember? Like an energy drink can be regulated as a beverage, a food item, or as a supplement, like a vitamin, and the food item is more regulated than the supplement is. And that's just classic FDA. Yeah. And I'm not even saying like, hey, government, you should put a cap on things.

But it's just hard to believe they don't even have to list what is in these things. Right. Yeah. It is very hard, especially when you start really kind of digging into how much stuff is in these things and that we don't fully understand how some of these things actually affect us, especially over the long term. And again, some people drink three, four, five energy drinks a day, every day, and have for years.

So really anything, we should be studying those people. Like a gaggle of scientists should be following them around, just taking notes like every day on them. Yeah. Put on your speed skates. Right. Yeah, exactly. Speed skates is more like it, am I right?

Yeah. We tried to follow them around, but we couldn't catch up. They were on too much sunny D rise. Tarine, of course, is still in there, like we mentioned. How much do you want to get into Tarine? I'd like to talk about it a little bit. All right. Hit it.

Go ahead. Well, like we said, we've been synthesizing it from the ox bile for many years now. And beings can actually synthesize it to some degree, right? Yeah. So it's not an essential nutrient for us, but we do need more, I think, than we produce. So we get it from other sources like meat and fish and stuff like that. And the synthesized version of it, like that you would take as a supplement, has been used in Japan.

They treat it, use it to treat congenital heart disease. They've shown that it treats metabolic diseases, inflammatory diseases like arthritis. And it does have an effect on human performance, like endurance of elite athletes, given Tarine show like a difference in how well they perform. By itself though, right? Yes. Like you can take supplements of it. And there's usually about 2,000 milligrams of Tarine in an energy drink.

And that is a high dose of Tarine. And we do know from study that Tarine does have generally positive effects on humans. But again, that's a really high dose. And we don't know how much a dose like that, multiple times a day, every day will affect you. Yeah. And then how it interacts with caffeine and sugar and all the other things, right? Right.

Exactly. Because that's the point of an energy drink. All this stuff taken separately can affect you. We don't really understand how they interact and work together to affect you. That's the big question, Mark. Yeah. B vitamins are still in a lot of these energy drinks, just like they were with that initial Japanese elixir.

B vitamins are, you know, can be really good for your body for sure. But we, again, combine with all the sugar. We don't know like what kind of effect, a lot of the kind of remaining ingredients, we don't know what kind of effect it might have when it comes to like ginseng and antioxidants and B vitamins and things that they kind of tout as being, you know, good for you. We don't know what kind of effect they have in an energy drink. There's another one that is pretty much in every single energy drink you'll ever find. It's called Guarana.

And Guarana, I do want to talk a little bit more about two chucks. So it's a climbing plant native to the Amazon, right? It's a traditional medicine there. And it's been used to treat things like fatigue, depression. Like it is an active molecule that like affects human beings. And one of the things that it does to affect us is it has like four times the caffeine that coffee beans do. And it also acts as somehow, there's some other part of it that acts as a booster to

that caffeine. So like some component of Guarana interacts with the caffeine in it to boost it and then would also ostensibly interact with all the other caffeine that you find floating around in an energy drink. So it actually is boosting properties and more to the point that 300 or 160 grams of caffeine that's listed on the label, that doesn't include the Guarana, which again has four times the caffeine of coffee beans. So you really have zero idea how much caffeine you're ingesting, whether higher or lower,

according to the label, because of things like that, because it's considered an herbal supplement and you don't have to list a darn thing that's associated with that herbal supplement in the United States. That's right. So that was one of the sort of, well not mystery additions, but just one of the extra caffeine additions. Yeah. And again, it really does have an effect on us.

We just aren't, haven't studied it closely enough to know, to predict stuff. All right. Another break. Yes. I'm ready for one. Well, we kind of been hinting around at this, but we'll talk about whether or not the energy drinks are actually bad for you or even dangerous right after this. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could

my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Cantrick curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So energy drinks, bad for you? Go. Well, here's the deal.

After researching this stuff, a couple of things are clear. One is, kind of like with most things, if you have the occasional energy drink and it's something that you have in moderation, it's probably not terrible for you. It has got a ton of sugar and a ton of caffeine. So just like any other sugary sodas or loads of caffeine, all that stuff in moderation is probably okay. We're not doctors. So if you have a heart condition or super high blood pressure or arrhythmias and things

like that, and you want to drink a lot of energy drinks, you may want to talk to your doctor and say, hey, is this a bad idea? Because there have been, and we want to point out, this doesn't mean that this is an open and shut deal, but there have been a lot of lawsuits brought against energy drink companies because of health problems that people have had that they at least claim stem, and I think they think it stems from energy drinks, but I think what we can probably say is, and what the defendant will say, which is to say these big companies is, hey, you can't draw a straight line from your stroke to my energy drink.

It's like there's a lot of factors going on with your life. Right. I don't know if any of these have been settled yet, I haven't heard, but the lawsuits definitely say like, hey, my kid was totally fine until she started drinking energy drinks, and there's a really famous case from 2011 of a girl in Maryland who was 14 at the time. Her name was Ani Fernier, or Fournier, either one. She was 14 at the time. She drank two 24-ounce cans of monster in a single day and died of cardiac arrest, and

she did have an existing condition, a heart condition, but it's not normally a fatal heart condition, and her parents are like, your energy drink killed our kid from drinking two of them in a single day, and it's not like there's tons of stuff like that, but I have not seen any lawsuits of somebody dropping dead from drinking two Pepsi's in a day, or even six Pepsi's in a day, so it is remarkable and noteworthy that people have suffered some serious health setbacks from drinking energy drinks, or at the very least around the time that they drank energy drinks. Yeah.

I mean, her autopsy straight up said that caffeine toxicity was a factor in her death. It didn't say. Again, this is where the defense will come for these things is like, hey, she had a heart issue already, or if you look through all of these lawsuits, there are other contributing factors, but certainly, like I said, if you have a heart condition or really high blood pressure and you're mowing down six tall boy energy drinks a day, it can certainly lead to some poor health outcomes. It certainly can, especially, yeah, like you said, if you have a preexisting condition,

especially like hypertension or heart disease, because caffeine is very well known to constrict your blood vessels, but at the same time, it releases adrenaline, which increases blood flow. You've got more blood trying to flow through tighter blood vessels, and that also occurs in your brain as well, and that's ripe for a stroke. It's ripe for a heart attack. You can make your heart like palpitate. There's just a lot of things that theoretically could happen and may have happened if these

lawsuits pan out correctly from drinking energy drinks. But again, like you said, generally, having one once in a while, especially if you don't have a preexisting condition, is probably not going to hurt you. Yeah. I think one area that they definitely have kind of made people a little more aware of in the past like 10 years is alcohol and energy drinks. Right. I know like vodka and Red Bull was a really hot drink order for a while at least, and

it feels like about the mid-ish 2000s. Have you ever had one? No, I don't drink Red Bull. Oh, that's right. It's a totally different animal. The two things combine to create something totally different, so I can totally see why this is not a smart thing to do. Yeah, I mean, you've got two opposing factors.

You have something dulling your senses combined with an upper basically, and that can lead to all sorts of problems, certainly with decision-making, whether or not you think you can drive and things like that. I think most people who enjoy those drinks will tell you that's exactly why I drink them, is because the upper and the energy drink does combat the sluggishness of the alcohol. If you're out kind of partying on the dance floor or something like that, that was so square. Yeah, we'll be partying on the dance floor.

But for a while there, they were actually selling, like forloko was a drink that was a premixed vodka energy drink with all the standard energy drink ingredients. The FDA basically kind of came out in 2010 with a stern warning to stop producing those, and it basically effectively banned them, didn't it? Yeah, it did. It said, we really strongly advise you against that, and I would guess that if the FDA advises you against that and you keep doing it, you're really opening up yourself to lawsuits, especially if you are harming people.

There's a really widely cited study from, well, after 2011, because that was the last date they went up to, but it was the Dawn Report, Drug Abuse Warning Network report, and they studied emergency department, ED visits that involved energy drinks among people 12 or older, and between 2007 and 2011, the emergency department visits doubled from 10,068 to 20,783 in just a few years. And so a lot of people point to that and say, yeah, energy drinks are toxic, they're poison, they're going to kill you, they're going to very least send you to the hospital. And other people who are like, well, hold on, let's not get into a moral panic over this,

these were the four loko years. And basically people agree that widely skewed the number of emergency department visits because mixing alcohol and energy drinks is such a bad idea and has these horrid effects. As far as I know, nobody's done a follow-up study to see if it declined after four loko stop being made with alcohol or with the caffeine and the torene and the guarine. I think it still may, but it's just like a sweet malt beverage, malt liquor beverage now. Now, do you know if bars have ceased to serve those mixed drinks from fear of lawsuits?

Not that I know of. I'm surprised that no one's brought a lawsuit against a club, a nightclub that serves someone, you know, nine Red Bull and vodka's. You know? Yeah. Or maybe it has happened. Yeah. Maybe it has.

It just hasn't made the news. Who knows? There have been studies as far as like just heart rate and stuff like that. There was one, and this wasn't a huge population study, but 15 healthy people between 18 and 30, and they had them consume two cans of one of the big brands, basically every day for a week, and kind of across the board, they found significant increases in both heart rate and blood pressure sort of on a day-by-day basis. Yeah.

Like a significant increase. Yeah. I guess that's what people are after. So it's not like we're surprised by any of this, but that's just to say that when you're increasing your heart rate at a steady pace, sustained pace, and your blood pressure, you know, that's not great for your body. No. And one of the other things that turned up in that study is that it had a cumulative

effect. So your heart rate increased by 8% on day one, and then 11% on day seven. So like it had a buildup effect. Like you didn't, your body didn't get used to it. Your body became more sensitive to it, it seemed like. So that was one week. Imagine drinking more than two for multiple years. You can imagine that it could conceivably have a really bad effect on your long-term

cardiovascular health. Yeah. But you also did find some studies that sort of showed that they can increase your mental performance, right? In focus? Yeah. Well, Red Bull specifically has been found from studies, possibly supported by the Red Bull Institute of Science and stuff, that Red Bull improves attention, concentration,

memory, driving quality, reduced variation in speed while you're driving, less mental strain in prolonged driving, which is four hours, and faster motor reaction time. Interesting. Like it actually, it does have that effect on you. Again, it's just a question of, you know, what's the health trade off if there is any and we definitely need more study on that. Well, they probably could find the same results in a methamphetamine study, you know. Right, exactly.

What is it, Benny's? If you take some Benny's, you probably do the same thing. Was it Benny's? Man, we are just so square today. Yeah, you take some Benny's and you go get down on the dance floor. But the real question though, my friend, is monster energy drink a satanic drink? I have a love hate with the internet, don't you? Well, that's sort of one of those dumb internet urban legends, right?

Is that it's like a 666 thing? Yeah, because if you've ever seen the Monster logo, it's like claw scratches that form the M, but they're clearly three separate scratches. Some people said, hey, that looks like the Hebrew Vav, a Hebrew number, well, letter, that represents six, the number six, and there's three claws. So clearly, this is just saying 666 right in our face. Their slogan is unleash the beast, which is of course another name for the devil. And apparently, if you look closely, I see what people are saying.

If you look at the O in Monster on the logo, there's like a cross in the middle of it, like a plus sign, but one, like the cross section is down a little further so that if you tip it up, you're looking at an upside down cross in the logo. Yeah, it's just this is what happens when you drink too much energy to start paying attention to stuff like this. It was wholly created from people drinking this stuff at the time. That's right. It's funny.

So I would say Chuck Jury's out, wouldn't you? Not on whether Monster's satanic or not, but on whether energy drinks are bad for you or not. Yeah, they're not for me, but I mean, I think any like, you don't want to drink six sodas a day. Right. You know? They say it's all in moderation.

That's the key to life. You don't want to drink six Coke zeros a day. No, you really don't. Don't drink six anything a day, except water. Or if you are, take the time and respect yourself enough to go look up and see like if anyone studied what all that stuff's going to do to you and then make a more informed decision rather than just be like, I like this. Yeah, but we're not doctors.

This is our suggestion. Yes. Anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since Chuck said he's got nothing else and obviously it's time for a listener mail. I'm just going to call this a nice letter of appreciation from a nice fellow. Hey guys, my name is Jonathan Bednar and I just wanted to thank you on the tremendous job that you and your team do.

I operate heavy machinery all day, which seems fun, but it can be rather monotonous and boring. Your podcast really gets me through the day whenever discussions of the podcast come up with my friends or family and make sure to hype stuff you should know as much as possible. Just the array of topics that are researched so thoroughly is really refreshing and I just leave off of whatever episode I was on and keep on going because even the quote boring sounding ones in quotes sometimes end up being the most interesting. So thanks a lot guys and P.S. I've listened to Josh Clark's Into the World podcast about five times now.

Wow, thank you. Very fascinating stuff all the way around. So go check out Into the World with Josh Clark. If you're into movies, go listen to the retired movie crush, but there's still a lot of really fun great movie crush episodes out there you can go listen to and it's good stuff. So thanks Jonathan for that word of support. We need those these days. Yes.

Thanks a lot Jonathan. It is nice to hear that kind of thing. And if you want to be like Jonathan and send us a word of support, we're always open to that. You can send it to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. We find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey y'all, it's Caroline Hobby, host of Get Real with Caroline Hobby, interviewing the most fascinating people in Nashville and beyond. I talk to artists, I talk to the wives of artists, I talk to women entrepreneurs who have created businesses, who are moms, who juggle a million hats and do it all. Each episode will leave you inspired feeling like you can accomplish your own dream and calling. Listen to new episodes of Get Real with Caroline Hobby every Monday on the Nashville Podcast

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