ENC 1102
Ashley Molina
10/29/2012
ENERGY DRINKS

Recently, it seems that energy drinks have become the latest fad - from tired college students to business professionals and children. While there may be countless different reasons for the consumption of these drinks, the question remains, are energy drinks ultimately harmful to your health? As a college student who has to stay up late at times to study, I myself have had to use energy drinks. However, I found myself wondering what was inside these drinks and when I looked at the ingredients, I realized I didn’t recognize many of the ingredients that I was drinking. As I try to be very cautious with my health and the things I consume, I wanted to further explore what was in these energy drinks and if they were ultimately harmful to my health. To begin my research, I searched Google to see whether these energy drinks were harmful to my health. I found an article by the McKinley Health Center, published in 2011, and titled “What’s the Buzz with Energy Drinks?” This article discussed how the amount of caffeine in energy drinks is usually much higher than the Food and Drug Administration allows in cola beverages. A high intake of caffeine may have minor effects in the short term, however, in the long term, it can have more substantial and detrimental effects such as bone density, harming unborn children, and weight gain. This article provided some good evidence to the detrimental effects of energy drinks; however, I wanted to see if I could find an article with a positive perspective on energy drinks. The next article I found was from the Washington Post titled “Energy Drinks May Have Negative as well as Positive Effects.” It was written by Whitney Fetterhoff, and published in February 2012. While it did speak about the many negative effects energy drinks can have, it also looked at the positive side of energy