So are they going to ban coffee too for under 18’s as well or pretend that doesn’t contain the same/more caffeine than an energy drink?
If it’s not the caffiene content thats the issue are they going to ban all soft drinks if you are under 18?
It’s not caffeine, it’s sugar
Okay then why does Coca Cola get a pass or chocolate or any kind of confectionery or soft drink?
Energy drinks have so much shit in it to help give you energy/keep you awake. Coke and other sodas have sugar and caffeine. And I never said that the others got a pass, they’re both bad for you, just one is way fucking worse.
Coca cola? probably because they are Coca Cola. Also it’s like 10% sugar. Maybe energy drinks are higher in sugar?
Solid things? That involves some effort - chewing - and you are less likely to eat that much sugar as opposed to chugging it down from energy drinks.
So are they going to ban coffee too
Probably not
You know, that wouldn’t bother me, and I’m a big advocate for personal choice and freedom.
I can’t speak much about Europe, but when I was in the beverage industry about 10 years ago, energy drinks often had ADDITIONAL ingredients (supplements) far beyond caffeine.
If you look on the back of those energy drink cans in the US, they don’t say Nutrition Facts, they say Supplement Facts. That is important, it tells you how the item is classified and whether it has to follow FDA rules on Foods or FDA rules on Dietary Supplements (like vitamins do).
And if you look at the list of ingredients in many energy drinks (I have a tub of powdered GFuel before me so I’m refreshing my memory using that–it says “Supplement Facts”), you see a lot of ingredients like L-Tyrosine or L-Citrulline Malate which never appear in anything categorized as a food with the “Nutrition Facts” label on it. These fancy designer ingredients are basically newly-developed things that do not yet have a long-term proven track record of safety when eaten regularly on an everyday basis like a food.
A “food” is expected to be eaten regularly, so the standard of safety is higher for ingredients that go in a “food”. There’s a specific list the FDA has that lists ingredients considered GRAS (generally regarded as safe). New ingredients have to be evaluated by the FDA to determine whether they can be treated as GRAS, or if they have to have additional regulation if a corporation wants to put them in a food, drink, or supplement.
Corporations, unsurprisingly, LOVE to throw all sorts of newly created ingredients in things, for marketing purposes, so they do a lot of shady shit like labeling their product as a dietary supplement–but marketing it as a food so people think it’s a food.
Something classified as a “dietary supplement” (as many energy drinks are) is not meant to be eaten regularly as a food item. It’s meant to be consumed less frequently to SUPPLEMENT other things you consume or put in your body. However, people often treat energy drinks as a “food”, as if they’re the same thing as pop or juice, which could potentially be dangerous to your health because the ingredients in them have not yet proven they have a track record of safety when consumed frequently in food-like amounts. (I’m not really talking about caffeine here, I’m talking about all the OTHER stuff they throw in it.)
Whether a drink is classified as a “supplement” or a “food” is important. It is a big thing, because the regulations for what can be put into something that’s a “supplement” is looser than what can be labeled as a “food”.
I don’t know exactly how Europe draws the lines or what the regulatory landscape is there regarding energy drinks, but it sounds like this ban is possibly because Energy Drinks tend to have ingredients that push the boundary on what is safe eaten in large amounts like a food and what might be more harmful like a drug. Europe is generally stricter than America when it comes to food safety.
The EU is a regulatory hellscape and it’s one of the biggest problems the EU has.
That’s not a bad idea.
Now let’s stop calling them ‘energy’ drinks.
Curious what you’d call them.
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Ah gotcha. Wasn’t sure if it was a pedantic thing or an ideological thing. Totally agree with you that ‘energy’ is a misnomer.
Then what would you call Bang with 0 calories & sugars and 300mg of caffeine? I drink that (half a can each time) when I want to stay up a little later that night, like on weekends and new game releases.
I’d call it a stimulant.
Caffeine soda.
“Can’t believe it’s not energy! drink”
“Chemical Caffeine”?
“Bull Jizz n Juice”?
Uhh…
These would be great names for mixed drinks.
Idk what y’all think but honestly I’d say these little cans of poison need a warning lable like cigarettes as well
No more caffeine for you!
Next step: Poland bans tap-water to under-18s
Just because you have a debilitating caffeine addiction, doesn’t mean that everyone else does
Under 18s?
That’s not a very long wait from birth to Monster. Just 18 seconds?
The OP meant “under 18-year-olds”.
18s is all this monster needs.
Good reddit joke.
You’re so funny.
It costs $0 to not be an asshole
This was also implemented in Lithuania around maybe 5 years ago. Some kids would still get it by asking their parents or strangers to buy them, but they definitely got more rare, to the point where at least where I am, you’d more often see a teen with a ciggie rather than a teen with an energy drink.
In Latvia this started on 2016, June 1st. Not sure if it ever was a big problem, I think this law came because there was an incident when some kid died.
Similar thing happened in the US with Four Lokos after a bunch of college kids died but we only banned Four Lokos due to the alcohol and caffeine mix.
Cue the black market for buying energy drinks for minors.
¿Que?
Fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa
Whoops lol, fixed.
Yeah… no. Energy drinks are already horrendously overpriced.
Only the wealthiest children will be able to buy them at black market prices.
Imagine all the new super strong energy drinks created by a black market demand. This is awesome!
It’s unlikely to cause any kind of large black market. In the UK, energy drinks have been restricted to 16+ for a few years now. People don’t mind off brand vapes or cigarettes (for some reason), but people absolutely care about the brand of energy drink they are buying. Kids especially, I imagine most only buy them to look cool, and if no one knows you are drinking a “cool” energy drink then why bother?
Underage kids will still drink them, they will just pay inflated prices for them from 3rd parties.
People that are old enough to buy them legally will buy up packs of them and then sell them to kids who cannot legally buy them.
Same thing happens here in the US with alcohol and cigs.
That’s a good thing, that’s less total caffeine they ingest. Which is the entire point. To reduce easy access to high dose caffeine. The kids could just huff coffee if they really wanted, no solution needs to be perfect to have an effect.
I’m not saying it’s bad or good, I’m just saying that Poland will need to do more than just restrict sales to minors if they want to have long term success with this.
No energy drink is as cool as the one with the skulls on the can that glows in the dark and is laced with Chinese research chemicals you can only get one the dark web or from your older brothers friend that believes there’s a Nazi base on the moon.
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Nice hearing about something Poland is doing right!
Is that unusual for Poland? I have no idea, myself.
Poland is doing a lot of things wrong on the judicial side.
By “judicial side” you mean “Poland is going Hungary/Israel judicial style”?
Poland does many things right
…as long as it doesn’t offend the church.
I’m sure it does. The thing is I mostly hear about the things Poland does wrong. That’s what trends to break into international news. That’s why I worded my comment the way I did.
I hope this would also include products like “5 hour energy”, which are energy drinks, but in a smaller and even easier to shot down package.
Those kind of things aren’t really popular outside of America. I only ever see them in America
It’s from Thailand and company is from Austria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_GmbH?wprov=sfti1
Seen them in Thailand. Red Bull was originally in small shot format.cam from there, and it was adapted for other markets.
The Thai family of the pharmacist who came up with the formula still owns 50% of Red Bull.
The article notes what the law applies to.
The law, which goes into force at the start of 2024, defines an energy drink as a beverage containing over 150mg/l of caffeine or taurine, excluding products where those substances occur naturally.
“excluding products where those substances occur naturally.”
That seems like a dumb exception. It’s not like naturally occurring caffeine is somehow better for you. If it’s above that limit, then the law should apply to that as well.
I would argue that naturally occurring caffeine is much worse than synthetic caffeine because it also contains rest of plant’s toxins and other not so good stuff.
On the other hand not that anyone uses sunthetic caffeine in their drinks. It is expensive as hell.
It’s a lot easier to pass a law banning the sale of artificial drinks to minors than it is to ban coffee sales to minors.
Artificial drinks, not caffeine? Coffee is artificial drink too because it is human-made.
It nearly impossible to define energy-drinks in a way that does not include coffee, but include off-the-shelf drinks.
Coffee has its beans dried and roasted, then ground and seeped in water. If you’re going to call that artificial, then you are claiming that literally any cooked food is also artificial.
And you are correct.
For those who think energy drinks are not the same, please point out at which stage coffee is no longer coffee and why:
- Make coffee
- Filter it
- Evaporate more water
- Add sugar
I’m gonna go with the step you didn’t list which is soaking them in dichloromethane or ethyl acetate for several hours, or submersing them in high pressure, supercritical carbon dioxide, to extract the pure caffeine. Then adding that pure caffeine into a mixture of artificial sugars, preservatives, and food dyes.
But sure, that’s totally the same as something that’s essentially a type of tea.
Coffee has its beans dried and roasted
Coffee beans are dried. Then beans then ungo a Maillard reaction, caramelisation, pyrolysis and decarboxilation to form new organic componds
then ground and seeped in water
Then ground to maximize the surface area. The prouder is then extracted using unpure H2O as solvent. A higher temperature is needed to raise the solubility of the compounds.
You can describe anything that’s consumed by people with chemical terms and it’s gonna sound unnatural.
You remind me of that old joke site warning people of the dangers of the chemical compound DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide)
Probably not a bad idea in light of the Logan Paul situation
I was about to ask if he did something new, but then I realized that it wouldn’t matter. That whole man is a “situation”.
Excuse me, but this is “the situation”.
Oh my god you’re right, I vaguely remember that guy exists.
What did he do this time?
I just looked it up and dear god… Kids will drink it too.
Are you fucking kidding me? Christ. “not marketed for people under 18” my ass, they fucking know Logan’s main audience are kids (idk about ksi but I suspect his is similar) and that kids are absolutely gonna drink their fucking caffeine nuke.
I work in a grocery store in Europe and now that Prime is produced in Poland and it doesnt cost absurdly, I can say that mostly, if not only, kids are the ones drinking it.
Edit: I just got back to work and checked that my country’s biggest chains only sell Prime Hydration, which is caffeine free.
I can definitely see the reason for the ban based on that alone.
That’s as much caffeine as 3 8oz cups of coffee, which doesn’t seem that extreme to me.
Any large iced coffee from Dunkin has more caffeine.
Not extreme for a child?
Define “child.” A 6 year old? I don’t let my 6 year old drink pop at all. A 16 year old? Not a concern for me.
Why is it not a concern for you? Where did you get your medical degree from?
Because I can do math? I don’t need a medical degree if I just read studies from people who have medical degrees.
As a layperson, I make decisions based on what scientists tell me, rather than thinking I know more than scientists.
You don’t need a medical degree to have an opinion. Caffeine is a mostly harmless drug.
You would let your 16 year old chug 3 cups of coffee in one sitting?
People don’t generally chug an iced coffee. I’d have many, many questions if she did.
The answer to this question is always: ‘who cares?’
In this instance, parents and pediatricians ^^’
What, never heard of morbid curiosity?
Nanny state shit.
It’s like you want to push people away from the center towards extremism .
I totally agree.
If not being able to buy energy drinks as a kid pushes you to extremism, you were already destined for that to begin with.
It’s a spectrum. They might not blow up buildings but might start hanging out in those forums. Shit like this is very unpopular with folks in the center of either side.
eh, fair enough. teenage energy drink addiction has caused me years of insomnia. we already have an age restriction on energy drinks in the UK, though it’s 16 not 18
I don’t think that’s true anymore. The ban wasn’t formally finalised and was quietly dropped during the pandemic. The store I work at still sells energy drinks to under 16s. We used to have to check, but they changed it and took the warning off our tills.
ETA: stores can implement their own policies though, if they do wish to age check people buying energy drinks.
I have no idea what’s going on then lol. pretty much every shop I’ve been to has asked for ID when buying energy drinks
It is essentially a popular voluntary movement by stores.
Reading those comments drops your IQ by 5 points. Now calculate the economic impact that will have… You can’t because reading this comment drops your IQ by another 5 points :(
the whole point of banning energy drink sales to minors is that minors are at a higher increase of heart issues because their body can’t handle caffeine like adults. but sure, everyone else is the idiot on this one and “the economy” is definitely more important than kids’ health
Finaly. This should be done in every country, since they are so unhealthy.
So you have a source on why you believe these are unhealthy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Energy#Ingredients caffeine, a lot of it.
They’re pure sugar water and caffeine. I drink them but do you honestly think there is a chance they are healthy in any possible way?
No? I mean it’s a decent source of B vitamins and taurine, but cmon.
But I don’t think chocolate is healthy and I let my kids have chocolate sundaes sometimes too.
I don’t see why teaching my children moderation could ever be seen as bad.
FWIW I don’t normally allow my 8 year old to drink pop (friends birthdays are about it) but my 17 year old having a large Starbucks coffee once or twice a week was not a big deal to me.
That all seems reasonable, but none of this was alluded to in your previous comment and it gave the implication that you were suspicious of energy drinks being labeled “unhealthy.”
Also I think there are benefits with chocolate. It’s the sugary Hersheys type chocolate that is nothing but empty calories.
Is any canned drink “healthy”?
Ensure/Slim Fast? Probably not a majority of them.
Liquid Death
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Rare Poland W
