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Energy drinks and shots are beverages that are claimed to increase energy and reduce fatigue. They typically contain caffeine along with a cocktail of other ingredients, including, but not limited to, taurine, glucuronolactone, carnitine, choline, electrolytes, and B vitamins.
Energy Drinks is most often used for
Last Updated:January 3, 2024
Energy drinks and shots are food supplements that typically contain sugar, artificial sweeteners, and stimulants like caffeine, along with various other substances such as vitamins and electrolytes, which leads to a highly variable composition. They are marketed to enhance focus and energy, are particularly popular among teenagers and young adults, and have raised health concerns despite their significant global market presence.
Energy drinks may reduce sleepiness and fatigue, increase alertness, and improve cognitive functions such as mood, attention, memory, and reaction time. They can also enhance exercise performance, but more high-quality research is needed to confirm these benefits because caffeine is likely the primary ingredient responsible for these effects.
Energy drinks have several drawbacks, including potential side effects like headaches, jitteriness, and sleep problems, as well as associations with increased stress, anxiety, and unhealthy behaviors. Additionally, they can acutely raise heart rate and blood pressure and may pose cardiovascular risks, particularly for people with preexisting heart conditions or if they are consumed in excess or with other substances.
Energy drinks likely work primarily due to caffeine, which is associated with improved cognitive function and exercise performance, but their effects are complicated by other ingredients, like sugar and various vitamins, whose contributions are not well understood. Further research is needed to clarify the benefits and risks of these additional components because current studies often lack adequate control groups.
There are no specific dosing suggestions for energy drinks or energy shots, but there are upper limits of suggested daily intake for some of the substances found in them.
For example, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), caffeine is unlikely to cause detrimental health effects if daily intake is below 400 mg/day in non-pregnant adults or below 200 mg/day in pregnant/lactating women, and if a single dose is less than 200 mg.[1][2] While more research is needed to clarify the safety and upper limits of intake for children and adolescents,[1] one systematic review suggests that this age group should consume no more than 2.5 mg of caffeine per kilogram of bodyweight per day (equivalent to 100 mg for a 40 kg person),[3] and some organizations discourage children and adolescents from consuming caffeine and other stimulants at all.[2]
Because some energy drinks and shots contain very high amounts of caffeine, and because high caffeine intake can cause serious adverse effects, the FDA recommends avoiding dietary supplements that contain highly concentrated caffeine since they can far exceed the upper recommended limit of daily intake.[4] For a detailed overview of caffeine dosing, read our article “How Much Caffeine Is Too Much?”.
To learn more about the specific ingredients in energy drinks and shots, visit our pages on sugar, artificial sweeteners, caffeine, taurine, guarana, glucuronolactone, carnitine, choline, electrolytes, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, and the B vitamins, including B3 (niacin), B6, and B12.
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Cycling of caffeine is necessary for people who prefer the short-term benefits that diminish with tolerance; however, caffeine cycling is not required for people who enjoy the long-term benefits of chronic caffeine consumption.
Chronic non-cycled caffeine consumption (in the form of coffee and tea, both of which contain many bioactive components in addition to caffeine) is associated with a reduced risk of several diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and chronic liver disease.[61] Caffeine consumption has also been shown to enhance performance on attention tasks, regardless of the participants’ caffeine consumption habits.[70] Clearly, cycling isn’t needed to obtain these benefits. So why cycle? The question usually comes up in the context of exercise performance enhancement.
Supplementation with 3–6 mg of caffeine per kg of body weight before exercise has been consistently shown to enhance performance over a wide range of exercise intensities and durations, with beneficial effects on aerobic exercise performance, muscular endurance and strength, sprinting, jumping, and throwing performance.[71]
Caffeine elicits an ergogenic effect (i.e., enhances exercise performance) primarily by affecting the central nervous system. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors in the brain, resulting in increased release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine, and thus increased alertness and focus. It can also reduce pain and perceived exertion during exercise.
It seems to many habitual caffeine users that habitual use reduces, or even eliminates, the ergogenic effect of acute caffeine ingestion. The rationale is that habitual caffeine use increases the number of adenosine receptors in the brain, and as such, reduces the adenosine-blocking effect of caffeine. This has been shown in rodents,[72][73] but has yet to be studied in humans. Evidence from human studies does suggest that habitual caffeine use can blunt some aspects of the physiological response to caffeine, such as an increase in plasma epinephrine levels.[74][75]
In further support of the idea that athletes should cycle caffeine in order to maximize its ergogenic effect, some studies indicate that when individuals with low habitual caffeine intake (< 75 mg/day) consume 3 mg of caffeine per kg of body weight daily for 20–28 days, the ergogenic effect of caffeine is reduced.[76][77]
However, in a 2022 meta-analysis of 59 studies that investigated the effect of acute supplementation with caffeine on exercise performance in habitual caffeine consumers, it was found that acute supplementation with caffeine improved performance during endurance, power, and strength exercises.[78] Moreover, the performance-enhancing effects of an acute dose of caffeine were independent of whether or not that dose was greater or smaller than participants' habitual consumption, as well as being independent of sex or training status.
The results of this meta-analysis indicate that caffeine does not lose its ergogenicity with chronic use; that is, even with daily caffeine consumption, ingesting some caffeine about an hour before exercise will still have a positive impact on performance in people who benefit from caffeine (which is not everyone). But is it possible that skipping a cup of coffee today will enhance the effects of a cup of coffee on exercise performance tomorrow? Probably not.
Two separate studies reported that abstaining from caffeine for four days prior to an exercise test did not enhance the effect of acute supplementation with caffeine,[79][80] and shorter withdrawal periods (24–48 hours) don’t appear to be useful either.[78] Therefore, the available evidence does not support the common practice of utilizing a caffeine withdrawal period before an important training session or competition to maximize caffeine’s ergogenic effect. In fact, doing so may even be detrimental, as a four-day withdrawal period was found to result in a number of side effects, including headaches, fatigue, impaired focus, and a lack of motivation.
It remains to be determined whether a longer withdrawal period can boost caffeine’s ergogenic effect, but considering the fact that acute supplementation with caffeine enhances exercise performance in habitual users, and abstaining from caffeine tends to result in unfavorable symptoms, the juice is unlikely to be worth the squeeze if the purpose of a caffeine withdrawal period is solely to maximize caffeine’s ergogenic effect on a specific day.
Full page update
We updated this page and it's database with the newest meta-analyses.