Energy drinks and alcohol: A terrible combination

Drinking and college have gone hand in hand for a long time. The fight song of Cornell University (my employer) actually tells the story of an undergraduate who is expelled for drinking

Tell them just how I busted

Lapping up the high highball.

We’ll all have drinks at Theodore Zinck’s

When I get back next fall!

 One thing about drinking is that it is often self-limiting: People reach a point where they fall asleep or feel disinclined to drink anymore. But in our ever-innovative society, businesses keep coming up with new ways to alter one’s consciousness, and students tend to be the innovators. One of the most pernicious new developments turns out to be energy drinks.

A new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association is a call to arms against mixing energy drinks and alcohol. Drs. Amelia Arria and Mary Claire O’Brien, experts on adolescent health, demonstrate why this combination is so dangerous. They note that “energy drinks have become enmeshed in the subculture of partying on US college campuses because of the simultaneous consumption of energy drinks with alcoholic beverages.”

You may recall that a few years ago, the beverage industry decided that adding caffeine to alcoholic drinks would be a good idea. The Food and Drug Administration disagreed last November, ruling that caffeine is an unsafe additive to alcoholic beverages. Studies suggest that this warning has not reached the ears of many undergraduates, who create their own energy cocktails by mixing alcohol with energy drinks.

The authors point out that energy drinks themselves are probably not very good for you. In particular, they typically include much larger amounts of caffeine than is found in coffee or cola beverages. And coffee and cola are usually consumed slowly, rather than in a “shot” that concentrates the caffeine. Studies have found negative effects of such intense caffeine consumption, like raising blood pressure and disturbing sleep.

But the problems are much worse when you combine something that intoxicates you with something that makes you more energetic. The dangers include:

• Drinking high volumes of alcohol per drinking session
• Increases serious alcohol-related consequences like sexual assault and drunk driving
• People who mix alcohol and energy drinks underestimate how drunk they really are, because the caffeine might reduce sleepiness but doesn’t change any other effects of alcohol, leading to “wide-awake drunkenness.”
• Caffeine can prolong the drinking bout by keeping people awake, and may thereby lead to greater risk of alcohol poisoning.

We at Evidence-Based Living are not in the business of making moral judgments, and if undergraduates are like we were back in my day, they won’t listen anyway. But many students we know do take scientific evidence seriously. So take a look at the article (and the studies they cite). We bet you will decide that caffeine is for the morning after, not the night before.