35
votes
Young people should be banned from buying drinks with high levels of caffeine, say health and consumer groups in Denmark
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Danish groups call for ban on energy drink sales to protect youngsters
- Published
- Aug 6 2024
- Word count
- 520 words
Drinks are perhaps one of the classes of foodstuffs that probably should be regulated far more than it is. I can't speak for Denmark, but advertisements for soda are practically ubiquitous in the US. So much so that most Americans don't even realize it; it's become background noise. And the sodas that get advertised the most are absolutely horrible for your health, even without caffeine.
One bottle of Coca-Cola has 240 calories that come exclusively from the added sweetener. That would not be so bad if it were a snack - but it isn't. It's a liquid, so it doesn't contribute much, if anything, to satiety. Which makes it absurdly easy to overindulge in, as well. That sweetener isn't sugar, either, it's HFCS, which makes you more hungry in addition to a number of other undesirable side effects.
(For the soda fans out there, Pepsi is actually worse: Coca Cola is 12 calories per fl. oz., while Pepsi is 12-1/2. Dr Pepper is also 12-1/2.)
Young people are pretty good at avoiding the damages of long term high sugar consumption - the benefit of youth. But having them consume such high levels of sugar sets them up to a lifelong preference for highly sweet foods, which makes soda habits a ticking time bomb. But the one thing they can't avoid is the calories. We already know that sugary drinks (which also includes things like juice and punch) are a big part of childhood obesity, and that is something that we know is extremely difficult to reverse.
Something that helped me visualize the amount of sugar in food was the knowledge that a sugar packet is roughly 4 grams. I could then look at the nutrition facts, take the amount of sugar, divide it by 4, and convert that into an equivalent amount of packets.
A mini can of Coke has 25 grams of sugar.
That means next to nothing to me as written, but if I convert it to “A mini can of Coke has 6 sugar packets” it turns my stomach.
Doing this regularly for what I ate and drank honestly changed my relationship with food. It also helped me understand just how much sugar is in everything.
For contrast that's an incredibly unhealthy way for me to think about food. Counting calories, or packets of sugar is a recipe for some really unhealthy thinking for me.
I only note it for others who may feel like they should do a certain thing popularized in any online space when it comes to food/eating/etc.
I genuinely empathise. I used to have an eating disorder as a pre-teen and early-mid teenager, and even though now I'm double my past weight, I still can't get myself to cognitively look at the calories of a product.
I still get annoyed at so-called "fitness apps" because I've never found an app that works for me and also allows me to hide calories/energy counting completely, because I still want to track my nutrition but I don't want to obsess with calories etc,
I did not share your level of struggle with eating but I truly think I've just been lucky in that regard. From a stranger, I'm proud of you for your journey!
It feels like someone has to have made a disordered eating friendly nutrition app. I use apps like Finch, more self care and self directed, but I have struggled to ever find something about food that was useful. I sometimes use walking apps that track my steps but I run low on energy a lot lately and it's been too hot to walk. Got one in tonight though.
If you’re comfortable doing so, can you help me understand what that feels like? I understand in a limited, purely intellectual, way that this could cause a hyper fixation and runaway thoughts. But I’ve never experienced that kind of thought process with food.
Yeah I can try, with the caveat that my situation is relatively mild in that I've never been diagnosed with an eating disorder, and I think my issues with calorie counting are exacerbated by my ADHD and possibly that my ADHD has acted as an unconventional protective factor.
Having worked with folks with diagnosed disordered eating these can be much more severe, and perceptions of self and others can be much more skewed from reality.
Lots of stuff about calories and diet that could be triggering and also I wrote a lot
For additional personal context, my mom lived on diets my entire life. She never really pressed them on me that I can remember though I definitely tried Atkins with her (because eating cheese sounded great) as a teen. She did Weight Watchers, Atkins, various other keto/low carb, probably a dozen others I didn't know about. She did praise me for being skinny as a little kid but like, she never made me feel bad when I wasn't (college for me).
That said, starting to count calories is "fine" in that I can look at the nutrition facts on the box and see what a serving is, or compare options in the store, no big deal. Even starting to track them feels ok at the very first. But really quickly I get hyper fixated on micromanaging my calories or carbs or whatever. It'd be macros just as easily if I tracked those. Especially because this usually involved some sort of diet, I was also quickly hungry. Literally every calorie counting diet I've ever been on, whether from My Fitness Pal or whatever has suggested around 1200 calories for me. Because that's the minimum they're "allowed to". So I'm hungry, growing miserable and obsessively tracking every crumb I'm allowed to eat.
I cannot maintain that level of hyperfocus for too long and thankfully several days later, it breaks for me. With a lot of shame and feeling like a failure. Sometimes I can pick it back up, sometimes not, sometimes I can maintain the diet longer, sometimes not. It always remains unhealthy.
For comparison, when I drive the hybrid car at work, I try to max out my "energy recovered while braking" and make all 3 of the little "eco" bars on the dash be full. I subconsciously try to "win" driving a hybrid. Similarly I try to "win" the diet. In part that ADHD but in part because society has told me if I don't I suck. I'm lazy. I lack willpower.
If I start to quantify soda as sugar packets (I drink sugar free myself) it will become as obsessive as quickly. It becomes how many sugar packets do I get a day. And then ensuring I hit that exact amount, because I'm probably hungry. And my mental health goes in the tank.
I'm actually diabetic so while I do eat candy occasionally I mostly try to moderate my sweets. (Pro-tip, candy you don't want to binge because it's too rich or can't because it's too sour or hot or something) And when I talked with my dietician about all this she agreed that trying to count sugars and carbs wouldn't be useful or healthy for me. It was more about finding balance on my plate, trying to mix carbs with fat and protein and add fruits and veg when I can. I don't deprive myself of food because it leads me to binge on it later. If I pick up cupcakes at the store, I will eat them individually over more than a week. If I don't have something at home, I'll stop at the gas station every night. Knowing it's there later means I don't have to eat it now.
Idk if that helps. I have orthorexic tendencies rather than anorexic or other specific disorders. So I was thankfully able to cut it out entirely. I don't diet, I don't count calories or carbs. I do stop when I think I'm bingeing on something, but I also don't beat myself up about it. I eat emotionally sometimes but it's not always bad. And I graze for meals a lot because my medication fucks up my internal sense of appetite.
Once you stop eating so much sugar you realize all of the places it is added but shouldn’t be. I remember going to a gas station in rural Southern California and being unable to find a snack that didn’t have added sugar - besides potato chips. Even the nuts had sugar! So I had to pick the least sugary nuts.
This is especially irritating being a type 1 diabetic in the US. Can't even find a decent beef jerky that hasn't been pumped full of the stuff. Having to be aware of every carb I consume really showed me why we have so many health problems here.
We had something like this hanging in my dentist office when I was a kid and it made a huge impression.
https://www.tandlaegeforeningen.dk/media/13254/sukkerknaldsplakat_web.jpg
This is telling me that I can safely eat a lot of flødeboller
I appreciate the data you're sharing here, but the article is very clearly focusing on high caffeine energy drinks. I view these as two separate issues. It isn't fair to lump them together, especially with many zero sugar energy drinks out there that can still give you a heart attack if you slam a few down in a row too quickly.
These are products that are from the same companies, coming out of the same factories, and often from the same processing equipment. There is a huge overlap. I realize there is a difference, but it's very related, so I don't see how it's "unfair".
Same companies, sure, many of them are owned by Coke, Pepsi, or Dr. Pepper. "Same factories, same processing equipment" can be said of tons of food. If we lumped together everything that said it was "processed on the same equipment as dairy, soy, peanuts, etc." you would have a pretty large product group with little relation.
All the soft drink companies bottle water as well, but the linked article has nothing to do with everything negative around bottled water, so I won't get up on my soapbox regarding that issue.
The market for energy drinks is also majority covered by products sweetened by some form of sugar. They are both public health risks caused by the same companies. There are so many ways this overlaps that I quite simply don't understand your opposition to talking about it. If I were on a thread about Freddie Mercury, would it be bad for me to talk about Queen's performances with Adam Lambert? You're making me feel like I'm doing something wrong here, but I don't understand why what I'm doing is bad.
Why not treat refined or synthetic caffeine as a pharmaceutical, rather than a food additive?
Naturally occurring caffeine concentrations in coffee, tea, and yerba mate aren't especially hazardous, due to the volume of liquid you have to consume to reach a toxic dose. These drinks are also perceptibly bitter-tasting, even with added sweetener and fats, making them less appealing to children.
So don't allow sale of purified caffeine except as packaged medication, with all the labeling, dosage and drug interaction information, warnings, and age-related restrictions appropriate to that use.
***I could apply the same reasoning to purified/distilled alcohol, cannabinoids, and capsaicin.
Edit: And possibly, refined sugars, per /u/Akir's point.
I don't believe it. Regular filter coffee has easily 60mg/100ml (so twice as much as energy drinks) and people drink many cups of it.
Coffee isn't sold as, and can't be mistaken for, a sweet soft drink that's safe for everyone. Adults, who've presumably developed tolerance, drink multiple cups of coffee. And they've had time to get underlying heart or other health problems diagnosed.
I'd rather not see soft drinks with addictive chemical additives (even if only mildly addictive, like caffeine) marketed to kids.
Notably, Poland, another EU country, also banned energy drinks for minors relatively recently, as mentioned in the article, and I very much support it as well — even as someone who's very into energy drinks. It may not be enforced too strictly (at least in my experience), but it's a good start to prevent the normalisation of those types of products since the younger ages as long as it's properly enforced.
Growing up where I did, energy drinks, alcoholic drinks, and cigarettes are all normalised since childhood – the latter two for so-called "cultural reasons" and due to effectively fully-unenforced bans on the purchase of those products by minors, but also because all 3 are seen as "cool". For reference, even at age 12, I think around half of my school classmates were smokers. A ban on energy drinks may of course raise the "coolness factor" of those beverages. So I also support that, like on cigarettes in the EU, graphic "warnings" should also be attached on alcoholic and caffeinated beverages. That being said, you can't really effectively prevent everyone who "wants" to abuse the above, from abusing any of the above and/or becoming dependent on it, but I believe you can reduce the amount of people that do.
In general I dislike how caffeine is largely unregulated – even more than alcohol – even though caffeine is by all definitions a psychoactive substance. I do believe we can do better than this, but I highly doubt there's any political will for anything more than a ban of caffeined drinks for minors, as it would probably effectively be political suicide for whoever suggests or implements it.
But all in all, I understand any differing opinions. In my case, my resistance to most of caffeine's side-effects is so high that I can drink 1 litre of energy drink and then casually go to sleep 1 hour later (although I don't really do that anymore), so for me, the only real side effect is that it makes my chronic pain noticeably less miserable, much like e.g. taking paracetamol. However, I realise that for most people it may be very different.
It’s interesting an exception is carved out for coffee (and tea, but that isn’t surprising). Is a Red Bull really worse than a triple shot latte? If you gulp down espresso then it’s a higher caffeine concentration than any energy drink.
It would be very weird, and of course very unpopular to regulate coffee but taken from a strictly medical point of view I don’t think there’s a meaningful difference. “Naturally” extracted caffeine seems as easily abused as artificial.
Even fron an exclusively caffeine-focused perspective (i.e. ignoring all other additives contained in most energy drinks), then it can be. Unlike in energy drinks, the amount of caffeine present in coffee can wildly vary (depending on both the :physical characteristics" of the coffee bean/powder, and method and "quality" of brewing, etc), meaning that the amount of caffeine in your coffee can even end up far lower than its "nominal value" — especially when homebrewing, if you factor in the comparatively high price of ready-made coffee and how mainstream/accessible specialty coffee has been getting in recent years. Comparatively, energy drinks are created to contain more or less their nominal value in caffeine.
So it really depends. If your coffee's amount of caffeine is lower than the amount of a 500mL energy drink, then yes. If not, then no-ish.
An exception I can think of is when your local coffee culture promotes the slow drinking of coffee. For example, where I come from, it's pretty common to be drinking the same exact coffee for 3-4 hours, because it's seen more as a social beverage (if in a social context) or a "refreshing snack" (if not in a social context), rather than a drink you buy to drink immediately. In the contrary, energy drinks (at least in my experience) are meant to be drank fairly quickly, both due to the fact that they don't fit into the "traditional coffee culture", and also because they generally taste quite "meh" when they're not cold. In the case of slow drinking, even though you're drinking e.g. the same amount of caffeine in total, you're drinking it over, say, 7x the amount of time, the maximum amount of caffeine in your bloodstream will not be as high as it would be if you gulped down the entire energy drink instantly.
Maybe just ban those drinks for everyone?
I had a boss who told me her husband was using energy drinks to study after work. He overdid it one day, had a racing heart, and he had to go the emergency room of a hospital.
why should you boss being an idiot have any bearing on whether I can buy an energy drink.
should we ban hammers because you can smash your thumb with them?
mind you, "energy drinks" are essentially just fruit-flavored coffee. 85mg in a redbull, 170mg in a monster 300mg in a bang or reign.
a cup of coffee has 100-150mg of caffeine. you want to ban people from having more than 2 cups of coffee a day too?
hands off my energy drinks.
Eh i'm fine with some limitations and advertising disclaimers.
If companies were getting paid every time you smashed your thumb with a hammer there would be a hell of a lot more perverse incentive to encourage dangerous behavior, and I think we see a lot of that with these energy drinks.
I got through highschool/college riding on caffeine from sodas and coca cola black, so I don't want to be a total hypocrite, and I also have never liked "energy drinks" so I don't have anything to lose, but it doesn't seem great that Monster reps wander college campuses handing out merch and drinks.
Are you 12? This is about impressionable young people and forming bad habits. Nobody’s taking anything away from adults here.
The person they replied to wrote:
Ah okay. Thanks.
Can we discuss these ban further? Why not ban alcohol for everyone too?
You can look at plenty of countries that have tried this for a very quick understanding of why it's usually not done.
In short, you basically make criminals out of the average citizen, create a HUGE black market, and have 0 way to enforce the ban realistically so it just becomes punishing those who get caught.
You ALSO empower the legal system tremendously to actually follow through with enforcement, because even though bud light isn't pumping out millions of cans every day, there's absolutely still that kind of demand, and now every local with an inkling of how to brew is going to be cutting into that market.
It's a really really ugly fight that's been tried many times, and the few countries/states that claim "they're dry" are often more "Well of course the poor people can't drink..."
If it weren't so easy to make, alcohol would definitely be illegal and a scheduled drug.
At this point, an "unhealthy tax" might be better. People will add sugar to things themselves, just like during prohibition when people made their own alcohol. The same reason why banning guns or abortion is useless - people will get the stuff they want anyway. It just depends if it's a safe way or not, so we may as well let it (and its effects) be safe while also being regulated, taxed, or otherwise supervised and mitigated.
Or maybe we don't punish people for what they eat and focus on food access and education. If you want to make a healthier society you don't make a bunch of people feel bad and like they have to sneak a treat. On top of the disproportionate impact on poor folks and families with both parents working.
Yeah, we should focus on that, too. I'm sure there's no "one size fits all" solution that will be perfect for everyone.
No I want to be clear, I don't believe it's a "too"
Full stop the solution is not to shame people for their food choices. People eat what they do for a variety of reasons. Dont think many of them are as actively trying to be less healthy. Solve all the other societal issues surrounding food before you develop the conditions for disordered eating at a statewide level.
It'd be like taxing non-routine doctor's appointments to make sure people are staying healthier.
Someone has to have written these dystopian stories already.
I live in NC, so for me, it's just a normal thing already (https://taxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Candy-Groceries-Soda-FV-01.png). As I was reading more about it, it seems like there hasn't been enough time for studies to prove these kinds of (unhealthy) taxes and (healthy) subsidies do anything yet, good or bad. Also, it's apparently too hard to classify foods as unhealthy or not (outside of sodas and candy, it seems). So idk. I feel this is more off-topic though, since the original post is about caffeine.
I didn't mean to make you upset, btw. I'm just trying and failing to get some sleep, so apologies if my tone came out wrong.
Not upset, just wanted to be specific! I was woken up by a crisis from my partner and need to get more sleep as well.
Classifying food as healthy and unhealthy is absolutely something that I see good dieticians refusing to do. My favs will point out that eating a salad with dressing doesn't counteract the vegetables, and that if chicken nuggets help you eat the salad, toss the nuggets on there.
We're getting rid of our grocery tax in IL for example and I just think taxing food is bad in general. But I don't like shame as a manipulation tactic and food is one of those areas where it's particularly important from a mental health lens not to shame folks.