New energy drink

[Abby_Normal]

We found this new energy drink mix that looks like a pretty good deal all around. It's called "Power Edge", and it comes in little packets that you add to water. A box of 10 is around $2.50, about as much as one red bull in some places .

It has 2x the caffiene of Red Bull, as well as ginseng and guarana. It has the same about of taurine.

The flavors are pretty good, and the price is right! Any one else drinking this stuff? I will be seening if it keeps me buzzing on graveyard in the noc.

And the bonus, You can bring the powder on a plane!

[bpitt]

Re: New energy drink

But the question remains...Does it give you wings?

[Abby_Normal]

Re: New energy drink

But the question remains...Does it give you wings?

Wings smings, it's loaded with yummy, life giving caffiene!

[zoasterboy]

Re: New energy drink

Caffine shmafine, i'm powered by my love of programming! (and caffine!)

[800XL]

Re: New energy drink

Can you buy it online..?

[INIT_6]

Re: New energy drink

Red bull has 80mg of caffeine. So that means this sh*t has 160mg of caffeine.

Don't mix with alcohol. Here is a report report about it.

sourcefor mg of caffeine:

Sorry for the long post, I just thought maybe you would like to hear about this.

Coffee: The demon drink?

IN THE middle of Portland, Oregon, is Pioneer Courthouse Square, a welcome oasis of open space among the city's bustling shops and offices. Business people and spiky-haired teenagers mingle here to wait for a train, eat lunch, or just watch the world go by. But above all they come here to drink. Even by the standards of this coffee-crazy city, the square is awash with caffeine. From 5 am until midnight, some of the city's busiest baristas keep the espressos and lattes flowing.

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance on earth, prized by almost every human culture for its ability to perk people up and keep them awake. In North America, around 90 per cent of adults report using caffeine every day.

And when it comes to caffeine delivery systems, our ingenuity knows no bounds. Starbucks, the world's largest chain of coffee shops, sells more than two dozen types of coffee and tea. Chocolate is full of the stuff. And throughout the industrialised world, food processing firms are turning some beverages "decaf", only to "caffeinate" soft drinks, pick-me-up pills and cold remedies.

But despite its popularity - or maybe because of it - many people feel vaguely uneasy about their caffeine intake. There's the fact that it's addictive. And then there are all the health fears. Odds are that you have heard the rumours. Don't drink caffeine, it'll give you a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or it'll damage your chromosomes. Or make you fat. Or, or, or.

How worried should we be? True, there are mountains of papers linking caffeine to all manner of health problems. But once you start digging, caffeine's critics don't have much going for them beyond an almost religious zeal to demonise the stuff. In fact, recent evidence suggests they are dead wrong. Caffeine, it turns out, has a multitude of health benefits. So much so that if most of us weren't drinking it already you could argue the case for adding it to the water supply.

Caffeine consumption goes back perhaps 8000 years, but the bad publicity is a much more recent phenomenon. One of the earliest documented health scares came in 1911 when the US government sued the Coca-Cola Company, claiming the caffeine in its drink was "injurious to health" (Coca-Cola won).

Caffeine bashing started in earnest in the mid-1970s when several major studies linked it with heart disease and bladder cancer. And that was just the start. "I've probably read 4000 or 5000 caffeine and coffee papers," says James Coughlin, an independent toxicologist in southern California who's been advising the coffee industry for nearly a quarter of a century. "Somebody has published a paper linking coffee or caffeine with just about every disease known to man."

Perhaps the most notorious study came in 1980 when Thomas Collins of the US Food and Drug Administration linked caffeine to birth defects in rats. The study sent shock waves through the drinks industry and led the FDA to warn pregnant women to cut down on coffee and tea.

In the study, Collins gave pregnant rats enormous doses of caffeine, equivalent to 200 cups of coffee or tea in one gulp, via tubes inserted down their throats. That method of force-feeding, known as gavage, is a standard laboratory technique for getting foul-tasting substances into lab animals. But it wasn't necessary with caffeine, which can simply be added to drinking water. Recognising this, Collins redid his study in 1983 with the caffeine in the rats' water, thereby spreading the dose out across the day in a more realistic fashion. This time there was no increase in birth defects.

Most of the human studies also turned out to have methodological problems. Some indeed showed statistical correlations between caffeine consumption and the risk of getting diseases such as cancer, but they failed to account for smoking - in part because the link between cigarettes and cancer wasn't well understood at the time.

"There were a lot of spurious results," Coughlin says, pointing out that while most smokers drink coffee, few people who avoid caffeine smoke. But now that a new generation of studies allows for the effect of smoking and other factors known to be linked to cancer, he says, "any relationship to coffee has fallen away". Likewise the much-touted link between caffeine and high blood pressure and heart disease. Caffeine does raise blood pressure, but only in people who are not regular users. In 2003, the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute quietly dropped a recommendation that doctors should advise patients with high blood pressure to cut back on caffeine.

Even so, the steady drip, drip, drip of adverse publicity has continued. One recent obsession has been the interplay between caffeine and low-carbohydrate diets, some of which prohibit caffeine on the grounds that it raises insulin levels and thus promotes fat storage. Nutritionists, though, dismiss such simplistic advice. "There are numerous processes involved in fat storage," says Linda Bacon of the University of California, Davis. "It may be that caffeine can simultaneously trigger some that are going to encourage weight gain and others that encourage loss." The literature does not support the assertion that caffeine raises insulin levels. If anything it has the effect of depressing them by decreasing insulin sensitivity.

Another recent flap has to do with caffeine's undeniable addictiveness. As every java junkie knows, if you skip your morning brew you'll be fuzzy-brained and irritable and may also get a headache. No big deal, you might think, and easily remedied. But to some it's no laughing matter.

In a study published last October (Psychopharmacology, vol 176, p 1), neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, argued that caffeine withdrawal was serious enough to be added to the next edition of the psychiatrist's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He reviewed all the literature on caffeine withdrawal and uncovered a dismal litany of symptoms, from headaches, fatigue and depression to vomiting and muscle pain. He also concluded that the benefits of caffeine are an illusion: coffee merely reverses the withdrawal symptoms.
“The words 'drug' and 'addiction' are powerfully emotive. Nobody robs banks or commits murder for caffeine”

Jack James, a psychologist at the National University of Ireland in Galway and arguably caffeine's fiercest critic, would certainly agree. James has long argued that studies showing caffeine's positive effects on altertness and mental performance are flawed because the volunteers are habitual caffeine users whose performance on caffeine is being compared with their performance without it. Caffeine doesn't make anyone perform better, he argues: it merely restores them to a normal level.

Caffeine supporters, however, believe that this is all a storm in a coffee cup. Just ask anyone who has wrestled with insomnia after an evening brew whether caffeine's effect is real or illusory. And sure, caffeine is a habit-forming stimulant, but nobody abuses it. Take too much and you feel jittery and anxious rather than getting high. And nobody ever got mugged by a caffeine junkie. "An addictive drug is something you commit a crime for," says Manfred Kroger, a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and spokesman for the Institute of Food Technologists.

Caffeine researcher Lawrence Armstrong, an exercise physiologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, agrees. "Caffeine is a substance of dependence, not a drug of addiction," he says. "The words 'drug' and 'addiction' are powerfully emotive. Nobody robs banks or commits murder for caffeine."

That's not to say that caffeine gets a completely clean bill of health. One real risk, according to Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, is a small elevation in bone fractures among people drinking four or more cups a day. That's because caffeine causes some degree of calcium loss, with a possible effect on bone density. But that's easily offset by getting enough exercise, calcium and vitamin D, Willett says. In addition, unfiltered coffees such as espresso do appear to have components that increase blood cholesterol. Since filtered brews do not have the same effect, the culprit has to be some as-yet-unidentified component that stays in the filter.

There are also lingering concerns over caffeine in pregnancy. The New York based Center for Science in the Public Interest, a powerful consumer group that has spent years battling nutritionless "food porn", is largely unconcerned about caffeine for most people. But it does advise pregnant women to switch to decaf. According to Michael Jacobson, the organisation's executive director, the literature is unclear but raises some concerns about reduced fertility, underweight babies and (possibly) birth defects. The coffee industry disputes these studies, but Jacobson sees no reason to take a risk. "For women who are pregnant, it's not a great sacrifice," he says. For the rest of us, though, he agrees that a couple of cups of coffee is no big deal.

Caffeine supporters, however, aren't content with merely countering the critics. Over the past few years they have quietly been building the case that coffee, at least, is positively bursting with healthfulness. Nearly two dozen studies, for example, now show that coffee drinkers have a 25 per cent reduced risk of colorectal cancer, Coughlin says. And the more coffee you drink, the lower the risk.

In addition, several studies have shown reduced risk of liver cancer among coffee drinkers, as well as lower incidence of Parkinson's disease and type 2 diabetes. There are even some tentative findings that caffeine may help stave off Alzheimer's disease, as well as alcohol-related liver damage. And lest you think the coffee industry or other interested parties funded the studies, these results were by-products of large, multi-purpose cohort studies such as the Nurses' Health Study, administered by Willett under a grant from the US National Institutes of Health.

Willett has also found that coffee reduces the risk of kidney stones. Drinking a lot of any liquid has a similar effect, but coffee is particularly beneficial, probably due to its diuretic effect. Also, he says, coffee lowers the risk of gallstones and, intriguingly, suicide. "Probably coffee is a mild antidepressant, and for some people it's just enough to pull them back from the brink," says Willett.

Nobody's really sure why coffee has such diverse benefits. "It'll be 15 or 20 more years before we nail these things down," Coughlin says. "Many people think of coffee as a caffeine delivery vehicle, but in coffee there are probably 2000 other chemicals."

Coughlin suspects that the anti-cancer effects are due to polyphenols, a class of antioxidants widely touted as the health "goodies" in red wine, chocolate, tea, and many fruits and vegetables. In lab tests, he says, coffee trumps these other foods in terms of polyphenol content. And a recent study by researchers at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania found that coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the US diet.

With such favourable press for coffee, why does caffeine keep on getting it in the neck? Kroger believes that, in part, the problem stems from young researchers trying to make names for themselves. The temptation is to feed massive amounts of a common substance such as caffeine to rats and see what happens. If the rats get sick, it's news.

Kroger also believes that the anti-caffeine sentiment is down to health-food advocates' bias against processed foods, a class that includes most caffeinated soft drinks. But he argues that some zealots simply seem to have a puritanical attitude. It's as though they believe that if God wanted us to be perky in the morning, we'd be that way naturally, he says.

When the dust settles, the debate about caffeine turns out mostly to be simple common sense. Too much caffeine will give you the jitters and keep you up at night. It might even give you disconcerting but largely harmless heart palpitations, and you'll suffer mild withdrawal symptoms if you stop. But all things considered, caffeine is your friend. Worry about something else.
Richard Lovett is a writer based in Portland, Oregon
From issue 2518 of New Scientist magazine, 24 September 2005, page 38

[erehwon]

Re: New energy drink

In my search for other energy drinks I did take a recommendation on VPX Redline and I'm going to have to pass on drinking any more, while it does its job very well on keeping you wired and with lots of energy, including inducing shivering to burn fat, it was the warning printed on the side of the bottle that did it for me...

WARNING: NOT FOR USE BY INDIVIDUALS UNDER THE AGE OF 18 YEARS. DO NOT USE IF PREGNANT OR NURSING. Consult a physician or licensed qualified health care professional before using this product if you have, or have a family history of, heart disease, thyroid disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression or other psychiatric condition, glaucoma, difficulty in urinating, prostate enlargement, or seizure disorder, or if you are using a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) or any other dietary supplement, prescription drug, or over-the-counter drug containing ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or phenylpropanolamine (ingredients found in certain allergy, asthma, cough or cold, and weight control products). Do not exceed recommended serving. Exceeding recommended serving may cause adverse health effects. Discontinue use and call a physician or licensed qualified health care professional immediately if you experience rapid heartbeat, dizziness, sever headache, shortness of breath, or other similar symptoms. The consumer assumes total liability if this product is used in a manner inconsistent with label guidelines. Do not use for weight reduction. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.

[theprez98]

Re: New energy drink

In my search for other energy drinks I did take a recommendation on VPX Redline and I'm going to have to pass on drinking any more, while it does its job very well on keeping you wired and with lots of energy, including inducing shivering to burn fat, it was the warning printed on the side of the bottle that did it for me...

WARNING: NOT FOR USE BY INDIVIDUALS UNDER THE AGE OF 18 YEARS. DO NOT USE IF PREGNANT OR NURSING. Consult a physician or licensed qualified health care professional before using this product if you have, or have a family history of, heart disease, thyroid disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression or other psychiatric condition, glaucoma, difficulty in urinating, prostate enlargement, or seizure disorder, or if you are using a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) or any other dietary supplement, prescription drug, or over-the-counter drug containing ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or phenylpropanolamine (ingredients found in certain allergy, asthma, cough or cold, and weight control products). Do not exceed recommended serving. Exceeding recommended serving may cause adverse health effects. Discontinue use and call a physician or licensed qualified health care professional immediately if you experience rapid heartbeat, dizziness, sever headache, shortness of breath, or other similar symptoms. The consumer assumes total liability if this product is used in a manner inconsistent with label guidelines. Do not use for weight reduction. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.

So basically, if you want to live, don't drink it.

[INIT_6]

Re: New energy drink

In my search for other energy drinks I did take a recommendation on VPX Redline and I'm going to have to pass on drinking any more, while it does its job very well on keeping you wired and with lots of energy, including inducing shivering to burn fat, it was the warning printed on the side of the bottle that did it for me...

WARNING: NOT FOR USE BY INDIVIDUALS UNDER THE AGE OF 18 YEARS. DO NOT USE IF PREGNANT OR NURSING. Consult a physician or licensed qualified health care professional before using this product if you have, or have a family history of, heart disease, thyroid disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression or other psychiatric condition, glaucoma, difficulty in urinating, prostate enlargement, or seizure disorder, or if you are using a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) or any other dietary supplement, prescription drug, or over-the-counter drug containing ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or phenylpropanolamine (ingredients found in certain allergy, asthma, cough or cold, and weight control products). Do not exceed recommended serving. Exceeding recommended serving may cause adverse health effects. Discontinue use and call a physician or licensed qualified health care professional immediately if you experience rapid heartbeat, dizziness, sever headache, shortness of breath, or other similar symptoms. The consumer assumes total liability if this product is used in a manner inconsistent with label guidelines. Do not use for weight reduction. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.

So I am wondering what is safer smoking or this drink. I think coke (not the drink) has less side effects :)

[hackajar]

Re: New energy drink

So I am wondering what is safer smoking or this drink. I think coke (not the drink) has less side effects :)

Smoking, unless your on birth control.

[cereal76]

Re: New energy drink

In my search for other energy drinks I did take a recommendation on VPX Redline and I'm going to have to pass on drinking any more, while it does its job very well on keeping you wired and with lots of energy, including inducing shivering to burn fat, it was the warning printed on the side of the bottle that did it for me...
<snip>

A friend turned me on to that stuff, and he made sure to tell me that ONE can is TWO servings. You are not supposed to drink the whole thing. And based on how I felt after drinking half the can, I wouldn't want to take the whole thing.

[bascule]

Re: New energy drink

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Red Bull Cocaine yet