Energy drinks stoke generation

CHICAGO — More than 500 new energy drinks launched worldwide this year, and coffee fans are probably too old to understand why.

Energy drinks aren't merely popular with young people. They attract fan mail on their own MySpace pages. They spawn urban legends. They get reviewed by bloggers. And they taste like carbonated cough syrup.

Vying for the dollars of teenagers with promises of weight loss, increased endurance and legal highs, the new products join top-sellers Red Bull, Monster and Rockstar to make up a $3.4 billion-a-year industry that grew by 80 percent last year.

Thirty-one percent of U.S. teenagers say they consume energy drinks, according to Simmons Research. That represents 7.6 million teens, a jump of almost 3 million in three years.

Nutritionists warn that the drinks, laden with caffeine and sugar, can hook kids on an unhealthy jolt-and-crash cycle. The caffeine comes from multiple sources, making it hard to tell how much the drinks contain. Some have B vitamins, which when taken in megadoses can cause rapid heartbeat, and numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.

But the biggest worry is how some teens use the drinks. Some report downing several cans in a row to get a buzz, and a new study found a surprising number of poison-center calls from young people getting sick from too much caffeine.

Earlier this month, a new study found a surprising number of caffeine overdose reports to a Chicago poison control center. These involved young people taking alertness pills such as NoDoz or energy drinks, sometimes mixed with alcohol or other drugs. During three years of reports to the center, the researchers found 265 cases of caffeine abuse. Twelve percent of those required a trip to the hospital. The average age of the caffeine users was 21.

"Young people are taking caffeine to stay awake, or perhaps to get high, and many of them are ending up in the emergency department," said Dr. Danielle McCarthy of Northwestern University, who conducted the study. "Caffeine is a drug and should be treated with caution, as any drug is."

The University of Utah's Poison Control Center, which handles poison calls for all of Utah, reports that in 2005 it received 84 "human caffeine ingestion" calls. About a third of these were classified as cases of unintentional overdose; the rest were classified as a misuse of the drug. Nearly half the calls came from health-care facilities — an indication of how serious the symptoms seemed to the caffeine users.