The pace of modern society is getting faster and faster, and the demand for human energy is also increasing like sesame blossom.
In order to adapt to this rhythm, more and more people begin to put their hopes on functional drinks such as Red Bull, which claim to be [anti-fatigue], and even some exercisers believe that drinking such drinks can improve their performance during exercise.
Is functional drinks really that magical?
If you want to correctly evaluate the efficacy of a food or beverage, you have to start with its ingredients.
Take Red Bull as an example. Apart from water as solvent, the main components of functional beverages are taurine, caffeine, carbohydrates (usually glucose or white granulated sugar) and vitamins, plus some food additives to prolong shelf life and improve taste.
1. Magic taurine?
Under the influence of manufacturer’s publicity, most people think that amino acids such as taurine are the effective ingredients of functional beverages.
Taurine is abundant in human brain, heart and muscle, and may have antioxidant effect, so it is hoped to improve athletes’ performance and protect heart and nerve.
However, experimental evidence proves that even if the taurine concentration in serum is increased to 5 times that of normal people by oral taurine and kept for 4 hours, the metabolism of human muscles during exercise has not improved at all.
2. Caffeine like a whip!
At the same time, more and more evidences show that caffeine in functional drinks is the real refreshing ingredient.
The 250 ml Red Bull Gold can contains 50 mg of coffee, which is comparable to 250 ml instant coffee.
Since caffeine is an established central nervous stimulant, the refreshing effect of functional drinks is actually to whip nerve cells like whips, forcing them to get excited and continue to work.
However, just like a whip that is too heavy can cause serious injuries, if you drink too much functional drinks, the large amount of caffeine ingested through functional drinks will cause harm to the human body. If it is light, it will cause palpitations, hypertension, nausea, vomiting and mental abnormalities that can be relieved by itself. Heavy, even causing cardiac arrest and death.
It is worth mentioning that the central nervous system of children and adolescents is not yet fully developed, they are more sensitive to caffeine, and the dose of caffeine poisoning is smaller than that of adults.
Although the packaging of functional beverages indicates that children and adolescents are not suitable for people, such signs are usually inconspicuous.
Therefore, in the eyes of children and adolescents, they are bottles of harmless drinks that can quench thirst for human beings and animals, and are easily drunk by these children and adolescents in large quantities, thus causing poisoning or death of children drinking functional drinks that occur every year.
3. Excessive Sugar Addition
Carbohydrates, on the other hand, provide energy for these nerve cells that are excited again.
Because nerve cells are very picky about food and only eat glucose, no matter what kind of carbohydrate the body ingests, it can only convert it into glucose and then feed it to them.
Therefore, in order to minimize the cost of transforming carbohydrates, manufacturers will choose to add glucose or white granulated sugar when adding carbohydrates.
However, the sugar added in this process usually exceeds the amount really needed.
From the perspective of energy intake, at the concentration of 13.3 g/100 ml of Red Bull, drinking two cans is equivalent to eating another meal. Therefore, if you drink 500 ml (2 cans) of functional drinks every day, the most likely effect after a period of time is that you have gained weight.
4. Vitamins involved in energy metabolism?
Many manufacturers choose to add some vitamins that have been proved to participate in the energy metabolism process, hoping that they can accelerate the energy metabolism of the human body and form a selling point at the same time, because the masses think that as long as there are vitamins, they are good things.
However, the fact is that under normal circumstances, if the dietary intake of vitamins is not deficient, then it is not beneficial for healthy young adults to supplement these vitamins.
Moreover, so far, there is no evidence to prove that vitamin addition can enhance the refreshing effect of caffeinated beverages, let alone improve exercise performance.
5. Food additives without biological function
Finally, in order to deliver such a can of beverage that you and bacteria like to drink well to your hands, the manufacturer will add citric acid and sodium citrate as stabilizers and sodium benzoate as anti-corrosion agents.
At the same time, in order to make you drink happily, the manufacturer adds lemon yellow and carmine to mix colors and essence to mix fragrance. The citric acid and sodium citrate in front can also make the beverage have a refreshing sour taste.
Don’t pay for it with health and life.
Speaking of which, I think everyone will understand.
The essence of this kind of functional beverage, Is to apply [carrot and stick] policies to your body: When your body is overwhelmed and expresses its protest with fatigue, these functional drinks beat your nerve cells with the whip of caffeine to make them work again, and at the same time give your body some sugar to keep it up for a while, thus draining the last little energy left in your exhausted body.
They are not as magical as everyone thinks.
Due to caffeine, excessive drinking will also produce many dangerous side effects. Every year, countless cases and deaths are caused by excessive drinking of caffeine, and relevant news reports have proliferated.
Therefore, when you feel tired, what you should do is not to drink functional drinks to refresh yourself, but to reflect on your previous schedule and think about how much of your time has been wasted by social networks, gossip, Taobao and other activities.
Then, you should rearrange your time and have a good rest.
The consequences of unreasonable timing should not be paid for by your health and life.
By KellyWeaver