You wanna know one thing that really grates on me? B.S. ads that misrepresent science at the most basic level and the consumers who willingly and enthusiastically slurp up the products without having any idea they are being hustled. One such enormous scam that’s in full bloom, preying on the collective ignorance of civilization, is the so-called energy drink business.
Everywhere you look, people are apparently in need of energy. They seek it from drinks like 5-hour Energy, Monster, No Fear, Jolt, Rockstar, Red Bull, Spike Shooter, SoBe, Vault, AMP, and many others. You know, people, you could start by getting enough sleep! The problem I have is that these caffeine-shock drinks provide zero energy. Period. None. Nada. Not one bit. At all. Never did. Nothing.
Jeez, I thought maybe I would start this discussion with a review of what energy is, but let’s assume people know that and are just getting mixed up about where to find it. First, though, we apparently need to step back and understand how energy works in animals before we can understand whether what we’re pouring down our gullets provides any.
It’s worth understanding a little biochemistry to think about this, folks — hey, you might even get a little kick out of knowing how part of your body works. In any case, the major energy currency in all cells is adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a nucleotide that consists of adenine, an organic molecule consisting of two carbon-nitrogen rings; ribose, a five-carbon sugar; and three phosphate groups in a linear chain.
As you probably know, sugars (carbohydrates) are the primary suppliers of energy to all living cells. Your body primarily runs on carbs. Stay with me on this; that’s just the way the universe wants it.
The energy from ATP drives most of a cell’s functions. Typically, only the outermost of two high-energy bonds breaks (is hydrolyzed) when the molecule is used. This converts ATP to adenosine diphosphate (ADP), which cells store along with a phosphate. This reservoir enables animal cells to do work such as active transport work, bioluminescence, maintenance, electrical work, mechanical work, and chemical synthesis. Heat is always a byproduct of the work.
All animals can biosynthesize ATP by breaking down carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The energy released is used to join ADP and a phosphate to create ATP for active use in cells.
Stay with me here, folks. When animals ingest nutrients, they capture energy in several steps. The first is glycolysis (Greek for “loosening sweets”), in which the body breaks down the six-carbon glucose sugar molecule in foods into two molecules of pyruvate and two molecules of ATP. Organisms can also create a small amount of useable energy by fermentation, in which more ATP is produced. These two methods, however, are somewhat minor in humans.
Far more importantly for humans, we also undergo aerobic respiration, which is the major source of ATP. Aerobic respiration creates 34 molecules of ATP for each molecule of pyruvate consumed. This process takes place in the mitochondria, the energy factories, of each of the roughly 10 trillion cells in your body.
As mentioned, the overwhelmingly dominant food energy source for animals is sugar (glucose). Animals also ingest fats and protein, though, which also can be converted into energy. Fats can decompose into glycerol and three fatty acids and then decompose and oxidize to produce energy. Because fats contain more hydrogen atoms, they produce 2.5 times more energy per unit of mass than carbohydrates or proteins. This is why most animals store so much energy in the form of fat. Proteins yield amino acids, essential for bodily function. These acids can be further decomposed into ammonia and other amines by deamination, which produces volatile waste and about the same amount of energy per unit of mass as glucose.
However the animal gets it, the basic energy source, universally, is the carbohydrate glucose (sugar), and the currency of energy is ATP.
The point is that these energy drinks, or the vast majority of them, contain nothing that actually provides energy. There is the funny contradiction. In the case of one of the leading drinks, the product has a few vitamins, some amino acids, and a shock load of caffeine. None of this, as we’ve seen from the biochemistry of how cells use energy, contains any energy whatsoever for the body.
So we are living in a world in which an energy drink marketed aggressively to hapless consumers looking for energy, promises hours of energy after you consume it, but it actually provides a grand total of zero energy.
I don’t know. I once thought science had a chance to explain and enlighten and help everyone — even those who don’t care about energy and the universe and biochemistry — to be smarter and understand what they’re doing. Each marketing campaign, though, in this world seems to carry us a little farther into the abyss of total nonsense.