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Comment by drcross | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone think for a second that those things aren't bad for you?

Washing down multiple cans of it per day and coupled with an unhealthy lifestyle is a guarantee to have trouble down the line.

I'm astonished that the author seemed to expect a different outcome.

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I was really bad for this at one time. Back in 2014 I was doing crazy shit like routinely working 14 hours a day or more, and in the evenings I would prop myself up by having a triple shot latte, followed by a Red Bull, and maybe a box or two of chocolate covered espresso beans. And I was doing this 5 or 6 days a week, for weeks on end. Not getting enough sleep, not watching my diet, not exercising, etc.

You can probably guess where this story leads... yep, onto the back of an ambulance, having a heart attack. :-(

Now anytime someone has a heart attack, there are probably a lot of factors involved. I can't sit here and say that energy drinks in particular caused mine. But in retrospect, the overall lifestyle I was living was not healthy and I paid for it.

So, long story short... don't be like me.

Why did you work that much?

Working a day job to pay the bills, and building a startup on the side.

I'm going to forward your comment to a friend of mine who is very much on the same track. Thanks for posting this.

The good news is, I lived, and the doctors tell me I should be fine as long as I commit to a healthy lifestyle going forward. So I got back into bicycle riding big time again, both road biking and mountain biking, and a typical meal for me now is something like I had for lunch today: a big plate of salad which was nothing but lettuce, salt, pepper, olive oil and a small amount of honey-ginger dressing.

I eat a lot of lettuce lately.. it's nice because it has few calories and takes up space in your stomach so it curbs my urge to snack all the time, which was a problem in the past.

Of course that's not all I eat, before somebody posts worrying that I'm going too far in the other direction. I still eat a lot of the same stuff I always did, but in moderation, and a lot more veggies now than in the past. And I mostly quit eating candy, chips, and other real low-value junk food.

Having a latte (with milk fat) and then a red bull sounds especially bad, as that provides a lot of fat for the vitamin absorption.

I drank 2-3 Rockstars a day for a few months back in 2007. I knew they were probably not great for me. They made me shake. I just didn't think about it. I also couldn't stop drinking them, because I didn't get much sleep at night ... because I drank too many energy drinks.

Related: we don't often think about how much alcohol we drink or red meat we eat.

That is my initial reaction as well, but there isn't exactly a lot of evidence out there to definitively prove that they are bad for you.

We are also conditioned to accept massive doses of vitamins and minerals by the supplement market, to the point where 2000% B6 doesn't sound like it's a big deal. When you also consider personal variability in absorption rates, dose timing, and concurrent food intake, it's even harder to control for all the confounding variables when poor health manifests in an energy-drink consumer.

Where would you get a 2000% dose of B6?

I have a typical multivitamin pack, sold in Denmark, which provides 100% of B6. Are things different in the States?

Percent dosages vary a lot. I had a B-complex pack once that had as low as 20% of a daily dose of one compound and 2,000% of another.

The supplement industry in the US is completely unregulated and very predatory.

Yes. For a while, you could buy beta-phenyl-GABA in a mass-market grocery store here, right off the shelf. It sounds relatively harmless, but beta-phenyl-GABA is a flat-out synthetic GABA-B agonist [1] developed in Russia in the 1960s. It works similarly to the prescription drug Baclofen. It can cause physical dependence, and has a potentially-life-threatening withdrawal syndrome similar to that of alcohol or benzodiazepines.

When it comes to things labelled as "dietary supplements" in the US, the FDA is more-or-less asleep at the wheel IMO.

[1] Edit: I'm wrong, it's apparently a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabapentinoid like gabapentin and the DEA Schedule V drug pregabalin.

The original story mentioned drinking 5-hour energy drinks, or their generic equivalent. Take a look at the nutrition label. 2000% B6 and over 8000% B12!

http://www.energytin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/ing...

Maybe not as high as 2000% but it is very common to see daily multi-vitamins contain doses well above 100% for individual vitamins. The explanation I've seen before stated that these vitamins are water soluble as opposed to fat soluble. You pee so much of them out that these vitamin manufacturers up the amount for better retention. I still fail to see why I would force more into my body than it wants to naturally accept.

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