The Energy Drink Overload Experiment
A comedy article
by Luke McKinney  11,193  112
04/01/2010 01:06 AM 7117 views
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Energy drinks are everything that's wrong with modern society in a can. Every tin is a psychologist's Pandora's Box of self-esteem issues, trying to convince you that:
a) You're utterly useless and broken in every way, BUT
b) It'll only take three dollars worth of X-treme soda to turn you into a rollerblading success story.
Unfortunately, I'm writing this article for ZUG, so I can't just list everything that's wrong with energy drinks, and laugh. I'll have to drink them. All of them. AT ONCE.
Before my body convicts me of carbonated contempt, let's look at the ingredients I'll be ingesting:
Mario declares chemical war on my guts.
Caffeine
Man, don't even talk to me before my morning trimethylxanthine
The most popular pesticidal psychoactive stimulant in history, and the core of modern civilization: antibiotics might keep more people alive, but if it wasn't for caffeine they'd all be sending smoke signals and wondering why that big bright thing kept coming back every day.
Guarana
Good idea, let's get energy from the horrifying ripped-out-eyeball plant!
Guarana fruit contain twice as much caffeine as coffee beans, multiplying their effectiveness by two, and are foreign-sounding, multiplying their effectiveness by how gullible you are. In Tupi culture they're also said to have sprouted from the dismembered eyes of an innocent child murdered by supernatural evil. So there's that.
Taurine
Not this kind of taurine. This kind would work.
Call something "bile" and people will realize it's a horrible-tasting vileness they shouldn't drink. Call it "2-aminoethanesulfonic acid" and they won't know what you're talking about, but will understand that anything that starts with a damn number probably isn't naturally tasty. But call it "taurine"? That's strong like a bull! Yum! (Oh, it's called "taurine" because they first filtered it out of ox bile. Tasty!)
It's practically a synonym for energy drinks and it's never been proven to help provide energy. (I love it when reality provides punchlines for me.) It has been shown to possibly help with skeletal muscles, decreasing blood pressure, and cats go blind without it -- so if you're an aging feline about to take up weightlifting, this is the drink for you!
P.S. "The amounts of guarana, taurine, and ginseng found in popular energy drinks are far below the amounts expected to deliver either therapeutic benefits or adverse events" Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, PMID 18595815
Ginseng
Grinding up and eating tiny naked couples with octopus-genitals - what could possibly go wrong?
The word "Ginseng" comes from the Chinese "Ren1 Shen2", which gives you an idea of how smart the westerners marketing Asian products are. I don't expect them to bring chemical-analysing mass spectrometers along, but when they can't even get the consonants right, I wouldn't eat anything they'd touched.
Wikipedia says "It has been difficult to either verify or quantify the medicinal benefits of ginseng using science," and when even Wikipedia won't risk making a claim, you may be in trouble. Also awesome is the implication that while science doesn't work, perhaps magic (or equivalent bullShakespeare like homeopathy) might.
Protip: All true ginsengs are from the Panax family, so any energy drink advertising PANAX Ginseng is upping the bullShakespeare factor to get an Xtra-Xtreme-X in there. (And that is without question the least interesting XXX I've ever indulged in.)
The Letter X and Weird Fonts
Clinical trials show that energy drinks involving weird fonts and high-value scrabble letters are up to 50% more Xtreme than others, and have a clinically higher chance of being rad to the max.
We've concluded that energy drinks are almost certainly bullShakespeare. But are we here to actually think about what we're doing? If ZUG did that every experiment would be "The time we thought about doing something but decided it would be unwise!"
So I shall now spend a day drinking every energy drink I can get my hands on ... instead of food!
Please continue to Part 2: The Breakfast of Chemicals!
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Like This? Rate It!
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Hilarious
10 votes
4.9
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Funny
2 votes
3.5
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Cyco Christ died so you can sin 11,330  11
04/01/2010 01:26 AM
5 Zugz for the Mario energy drink. Other than that, I've had every single one of those and you are going to have ssoo mmuucchh fuunn. Don't worry, the shake go away eventually.
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Funny
1 votes
3.0
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Alt+Ctrl+Ravos 63,472 21
04/01/2010 01:33 AM
I like energy drinks. I realize they are probably terrible for my body, but I like it.
Except that one time I drank 3 cans of rockstar in about 2 hours. My heart was angry at me for no less than 3 days.
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Chuckleworthy
2 votes
2.5
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John Hargrave 128,751 73
04/05/2010 07:35 AM
I gave up all energy drinks and now consume only white tea.
I feel a lot healthier, but unfortunately I fall asleep every day about 3 pm.
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Funny
1 votes
3.0
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cokebabies 1,385 14
04/05/2010 07:51 AM
Now you can tell that smug prick from the 5 Hour Energy commercials what 3:30 really feels like.
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Amusing
1 votes
1.0
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Utaro 34 6
04/05/2010 05:22 PM
To answer the question in the title:
http://fefupoo.posterous.com/warning-drinking-freakishly-large-amounts-of
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