There are a lot of things college students are in short supply of: food points, time, sleep and especially energy. And that's what Red Bull is for. Or, was for.
University of New Hampshire has committed to becoming the “healthiest campus community in the country by 2020” and in an effort to reach that goal, they have banned the sale of energy drinks on campus late September, according to an Oct. 1 2009 press release. The university cited the dangers of mixing the drinks with alcohol as its primary reasons for the new measure.
The announcement elicited a large buzz from the student body. The New Hampshire, the student newspaper of UNH, in an editorial denounced the proposed ban, calling it irrational, hypocritical, foolish and an overreaction. Within four days of declaring its ban of the sale of energy drinks, UNH abandoned the plan altogether.
Energy drinks, like Full Throttle, Red Bull, and NOS, have long been aggressively marketed to college students. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry. According to Mintel, a market research group, from 2010 to 2011, sales of energy drinks have grown 15.4 percent.
Energy drinks have also been targeted for its possibly harmful effects on the body. Last November, the Food and Drug Administration banned commercial alcoholic energy drinks. This action was in response to the hospitalization of several college students after drinking Four Loko. According to the National Institute on Alchohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a standard serving of a mixed alcohol drink contains up to four times the amount of caffeine as a standard serving of mixed alcohol and soda drink.
Scott Swartzwelder, a professor of psychology who studies substance abuse, agreed that the interaction between alcohol and energy drinks can only culminate into trouble. Consumption of both caffeine and alcohol at the same time is especially detrimental to the health and performance of Duke students, he added.
“The problem in mixing the two [beverages] comes into play when students do not realize how impaired they actually are and are, then, inclined to drive and do other things they shouldn’t [be doing],” said James Lane, research professor of behavioral psychiatry.
In response to the proposed ban at UNH, Swartzwelder was ambivalent about the university’s approach to creating a healthier campus.
“If you were to line up all the harmful ingredients that college students put in their bodies, energy drinks would be towards the bottom,” Swartzwelder said.
He instead suggested educating students about the harmful effects of energy drinks. Swartzwelder is in his thirteenth year of teaching Psychology 110, Alcohol: Brain, Individual and Society, a course that was built on the dual rationale that alcohol is a good lens to teach students about the brain and behavior and to educate students about the effects of alcohol.
“Universities are in the business of educating people, and so the logical answer would be to make this an educational issue,“ Swartzwelder said.
But, without mixed with any alcohol, how bad are energy drinks for you? This answer depends on who you ask.
“Most energy drinks have less caffeine than a cup of coffee,” Lane said. “So, a student will get more caffeine from a small cup of coffee at the Perk than from Red Bull.”
Lane, who has studied the effects of caffeine for over 25 years at Duke, added that a proposed ban on energy drinks would be ineffective as long as the university maintained the selling and provision of unlimited coffee in dining halls and in restaurants.
Freshman Clair Hong believed that there were negative health benefits to drinking energy drinks, but that this fact has not deterred many of her friends from resorting to these drinks, especially during midterm weeks.
“A possible ban would not stop students from drinking, but it would create quite an uproar," Hong said. "Whether it’s healthy or not, students should have a right to choose what they consume."
Huddleston recently issued a statement saying that there was no clear evidence that correlated the relationship between the consumption of energy drinks and alcohol abuse. He concluded that further research would need to be conducted.
On that note, both Swartzwelder and Lane pointed out that both nonalcoholic and alcoholic energy drinks and their effects on the human body are under-studied on the research front.
“This lack of information does not, in any way, mitigate my point that we do have enough information to know that there are negative effects when these drinks are consumed in excess and with alcohol,” Swartzwelder said. “We know enough to caution college students and educate them on how to be safe.”
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