When walking through the halls of Cavelero, there’s always a few students cracking open cans of various energy drinks. Although the students select these beverages with the intention of improving their energy levels and help them focus on their studies, energy drinks actually have the opposite effect.
Ironically, energy drinks are considered to be quite harmful to concentration among the healthcare community. They can cause extreme dehydration, which leads to an increase in heart rate, which triggers the fight or flight response.
This paired with the high sugar and caffeine content, which increases anxiety, irritability, and nausea, creates huge problems for the consumers. Especially when they’re adolescents, such as teens who have a habit of their poor behavior being blamed on their age. Adults typically like to criminalize teens based on their moodiness and reactivity. However, that reactivity is largely due to factors beyond their control, for example, the energy drinks that they are told to consume so they can concentrate on important things like school, and sports, instead of the needs of their bodies.
Not only this, but most teen sport teams have a clause in their contract that doesn’t allow energy drink consumption. Additionally, he NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) has multiple ingredients that are prevalent in popular energy drinks on their banned substances list.
Especially now that the consumption of energy drinks have been linked to heart complications such as irregular heartbeat and heart failure. Despite this however, large corporations still promote these products, and consumers still buy them. This is likely due to both lack of knowledge, and simple disinterest. That disinterest being that we as a society think, as the kids say, “it’s not that deep”. Or in other words, an issue not serious enough to be concerned about. Perhaps even if it is considered an issue, it would be a fleeting and inconsequential one. Should that be the general opinion, it would be incorrect. In a review published by the NLM (Nation Library of Medicine) and the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnological Information), has shown an alarming amount of reported effects of energy drinks on the cardiovascular system and the neurovegetative system (nerves and such, which are highly receptive to caffeine). Also reported in this review are the identified nine cases of cardiac arrest, which have a close connection to energy drinks. Three of those cases were fatal.
So if the medical and healthcare communities have seen severe danger in these products; If colleges and athletic associations decided that energy drinks are a risk to athletes’ health, some of the most in shape and capable people in our society. If there is a line in Cavelero Mid High Schools own Track and Field Agreement form that athletes will not consume energy drinks during the Track and Field season, then certainly no one at Cavelero Mid High School should consume them, no matter the season. Especially not our students. Especially when our students’ health is at risk.
