13 Energy Drinks In 3 Sessions

circletimessquare writes "As a member of the cult of caffeine, as I suspect many Slashdot readers are, I was pleasantly amused by this story in The New York Times entitled Opening 13 Cans of Whoop (reg req). Our brave reporter sucks down a number of energy drinks of various parentages and gives us the lowdown on their taste, appearance, ingredients, overall effect, and dubious appeal. Example: 'At this point, my energy level was not only elevated, it was speeding toward the red line. I felt myself staring holes through my computer screen, typing at five times my normal rate and thinking far too creatively about life questions like how many AA batteries I needed to buy when I went to the drug store. My mood was chipper. Too chipper.'"

Comments

Energy Drinks Vs. Sleep

[Poeir]

While it's real great to be awake and theoretically able to do something productive until the wee hours of the night, there is no substitute for honest to goodness sleep. It's a lot cheaper than a $2 eight-ounce can, too.

Sleep when you can. You won't regret it.

Re:Energy Drinks Vs. Sleep

[metlin]

True.

And again, if you drink coffee in limited quantities (like say, not more than a couple of cups a day), you will notice that when you need to stay up, having an extra cup or two really has an effect.

When you are a heavy coffee drinker who cuts back on coffee, the first couple of times you have more than your usual dose of caffeine, it takes you on a real alertness mode.

And the worst part is that the more the coffee you have, the less regular your sleeping habits become. You stop having good sleep, and therefore your waking hours become kinda blurry. At which point, you resort to more caffeine. A vicious circle.

A cup (at most two) a day is just about fine, IMHO.

Whatever

[molafson]

I felt myself staring holes through my computer screen, typing at five times my normal rate and thinking far too creatively about life questions like how many AA batteries I needed to buy when I went to the drug store.

Whatever! You'd think the guy was smoking crystal meth or something. Anyway, if you want to feel healthy and alert, try:
(a) Eating nutritiously and sparingly,
(b) Exercising every day, and
(c) Sleeping regularly (same time every day) for 8 hours.

The good old days....

[PeterPumpkin]

Red Bull wasn't the first energy drink. Remember, Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine.

cutting down on caffein

[arabagast]

um, I know this is kinda blasphemy here on slashdot, but my tip is actually to reduce your dose of caffeine. I used to drink *lots* of coffee and other caffeinated beverages earlier, but decided to try a little break and watch the difference. My conclusion is as follows (beware: these are my personal experiences, your might be completely different)

1. If you are going to be doing a lot of intensive work, in need of intense concentration (such as coding), you shouldn`t pour down coffee like you never saw it before. The coffee dehydrates your body, leading to less-than-optimal body functionality and can actually make you less suited to do the job intented.
2. If you, as we all do once in a while, drink buckets of coffee - remember to drink lots of water or other beverage to compensate for the water loss brought on by the caffeine. It`s important to have enough water in your body, we're water creatures after all ^^.

but, who am I kidding - Coffee is G-O-D :P

Re:caffeine

[the_mad_poster]

Caffeine is a device that turns coders into caffiene joke posters on Slashdot.

Re:Cocaine?

[insomaniac]

Why do so few nerds smoke weed or coke

Well, here in the netherlands there are a lot of geeks who do smoke weed, I'm one of them, if its nicely grown weed it gives me a focus on what I'm doing. I code very well when I smoked a nice joint. The problem is starting the work, but when finally started its like your in your own coding world and you can visualise the entire structure of the code, even better than when you are sober.

I've tried cocaine a few times and didn't really like that, MDMA was more fun but one should not do that often either. And these are party drugs, not drugs you take when your alone in front of your computer.

But then again I think that weed as a drug is less harmfule than alcohol for many reasons which I won't go into unasked. ;)

Re:Taurine vs. Caffeine

[barakn]

The article wasn't science, but your idea isn't either. The only way for you to be sure is if somebody packages caffeine or caffeine/taurine into indistinguishable capsules and then feeds them to you over successive nights in a double-blind experiment (they can't know what they're giving to you either until afterwards). Otherwise you're just testing the placebo effect. Perhaps your experience with Red Bull is influenced by Red Bull's massive marketing campaign. Coffee advertising tends to advertise its flavor, not its stimulant properties.