Further Expositions of Truth!

Whoa, it's getting hard to post on Tuesdays for some reason. Weird. So another early post. Praise the lawd.

So, exposing more hidden truths of stuff. This time around, it's energy drinks. These things baffle me, because coffee tastes better and doesn't rape your organs as badly, but apparently some people need huge amounts of caffeine and sugar to function. Me, I'm a salt and booze junkie, so I don't need the hypervitamins that energy drinks provide.
Interestingly enough, and by interesting I mean I couldn't think of a good segue here, they're crammed full of weird chemicals. 250mL of red bull has 27g of sugar and 80mg of caffeine. High sugar intake has been conclusively linked to the onset of type 2 diabetes and large doses of caffeine can cause something called "caffeinism" (real imaginative name) which has a whole host of unpleasant side effects. additionally, caffeine can make certain medicines more toxic than they already are. I didn't even realise medicine was toxic, but there you go. If you take enough, you can also get hallucinations, but I don't know if that's a good or bad side-effect. Additionally, hospitalisations due to caffeine poisoning have been recorded for doses as small as 2 grams. The lethal dose appears to be the equivalent of 80-100 cups of coffee for an adult male. That's one to try on the weekend.
Weird thing is, all energy drinks taste like crap. That's a little subjective, but to me, they just smell bad. I know a few people that do drink them, and the consensus is that they drink them to stay buzzed for study or work or whatever, not for the taste. If you do drink them for the taste, more power to you, but they really just taste... odd.
So, what 's the crux of all this? Well, they're full of all kinds of mood altering goodies, although people probably think they need them more than they actually do. They don't taste unpleasant, but personal experience seems to point to them not being anyone's absolute favourite beverage. The hidden truth of energy drinks seems to be "people will buy, consume and become dependent on anything that is crammed full of stuff if they can be convinced they need said stuff to function, even though they were doing fine without them before." I suppose that's a little obvious, but to be fair, a beer buzz makes you charming and handsome, while a caffeine buzz turns you into a more mellow version of a crack addict.