Energy drinks have helped me power through god knows how many long nights, nights when my body was ready to shut down but my brain told me I needed to keep studying (or partying). I’ve never binged on energy drinks for an extended period of time because I’m a coffee man. And at this moment I’m thankful as hell for my coffee bean addiction because a report has emerged of a 50-year-old construction worker contracting acute hepatitis after binging on energy drinks for just THREE weeks.
George Dvorsky of Gizmodo.com reports:
A new case report published in the British Medical Journal highlights the need for consumers to be aware of all the ingredients found in popular food and drink items, and to avoid the over-consumption of dietary supplements. Doctors who treated the unnamed man believe his sudden bout of hepatitis was caused by his excessive energy drink consumption, which included the ingestion of copious amounts vitamin B3, also known as niacin.
As a construction worker, the man began to consume energy drinks to help him power through his labor-intensive workday. Aside from hitting the energy drinks with unusual fervor, he didn’t make any other changes to his eating and drinking habits. Soon afterwards, the man started to become unusually fatigued, and he began to experience abdominal pain. When this turned to nausea and vomiting, he figured he had the flu—but the man became particularly alarmed when he developed dark urine and jaundice (his skin was turning yellow). Wisely, he went to the emergency department.
Three weeks. That’s all it took for him to come down with acute hepatitis from excessively drinking energy drinks. That is some scary ass shit right there.
I’ve always gravitated more towards coffee than energy drinks just because I prefer the taste, but I definitely have a fond spot for the Mountain Dew AMP energy drinks because unlike many others on the market it’s actually delicious, and doesn’t taste like a janitor’s bucket smells. At no point in my life would I say that I’ve ever ‘overdone it’ with energy drinks but that’s only because I’ve typically binged on coffee. Still, this freaks me out. That at any given time someone going through an energy drink binge can over do it and come down with acute hepatitis in just a few weeks. That’s some truly scary shit right there.
Side note: early on in this article I went to type out ‘hepatitis’ and instead typed ‘hepatits‘, and now I can’t help but think doctors really missed a golden opportunity in naming this disease.
…(h/t Gizmodo)…