Months after the family of a 17-year-old Texas cheerleader filed a wrongful death lawsuit against a distributor of a popular energy drink, claiming the teenager died from an enlarged heart caused by ingesting large amounts of caffeine, Zoa Barbee at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, noticed how these energy drinks, such as Celcius, Monster, and Alani, are everywhere at her high school, from “vending machines in [the school’s] hallways” to “large fridges in lunch lines” that promote the drinks.
“Take Alani, for example,” Zoa continues. “The bright, fun coloring, the collabs with popular influencers, the ‘zero sugar/ten carbs, and the sheer accessibility have made it one of the most popular energy drinks on the market, and an easy trap for students and the women it is marketed to.”
Simply put, this marketing tactic is simply taking advantage of something everyone already knows: Caffeine is embedded in the DNA of US high school students.
Writes Joseph Wilson in the student newspaper at Ascension Episcopal School in Lafayette, Louisiana: “Caffeine allows one to stay up after a game and do homework, apply to colleges, or practice. Because of caffeine, they can get up, drink a coffee, and do it all again. A perfect solution for a high school student facing the problem of too little sleep and far too little time to make it up.”
But at what cost?
Don’t just take the death of one teenager and extrapolate to all teens. Just know that reports going back more than a decade have linked excessive use of energy drinks to teen deaths in the US and Canada, The Toronto Star reported.
In sddition to news reports, though, peer-reviewed research has noted that excessive caffeine intake by adolescents has been associated with a number of detrimental health effects such as nervousness, irritability, nausea, cardiovascular symptoms, sleep impairment, osteoporosis, and gastric ulcers.