One Popular Drink Greatly Increases Your Risk of Heart Attack

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When you feel yourself low on energy, yawning all afternoon, ready to go home and take a nap but you can’t leave work for hours yet, do you reach for one of those energy drinks? Many people do, mistakenly thinking that they must be better for them than plain old coffee or green tea. Energy drinks are hip and cool because they give you wings, remember? They sponsor those extreme sporting events and think up those clever marketing schemes that make you believe that if you drink that can with the red colored bull on it, or the green claw marks down the side of the can, that you, too, will be a daring, creative person, filled with innovate ideas that are considered outside the box thinking.

What those clever marketing ploys don’t tell you is that most energy drinks, especially the one that gives you wings, has been linked to cardiovascular disease, including an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. That super popular drink has been banned in several countries including Denmark and Norway, and France stopped selling them for about a 12 year period.

The main ingredients in most energy drinks are sugar and caffeine. Many of the sugar free versions contain aspartame, a dangerous artificial sweetener that has been strongly linked to metabolic problems, allergies, neurotoxic, and carcinogenic compounds. Energy drinks thicken the blood dramatically while providing the body with unnaturally high levels of stimulation. Just one hour after drinking an average sized energy drink, blood thickness becomes abnormal and resembles the blood of patients with heart failure, according to the lead researcher at the Cardiovascular Research Center in Australia. Researchers state that consuming energy drinks in combination with high levels of stress or high blood pressure, can actually cause damage to the blood vessels in the body and increases the risk of blood clots. For those who have a predisposition towards heart disease, this is especially dangerous.

Besides the abnormally high caffeine content, energy drinks contain chemicals that have not been thoroughly researched. Many young adults love to mix these drinks with alcohol, which only adds to the dangers. Mixing an energy drink with alcohol is mixing a stimulant with a depressant. This is a confusing overload to the body, which can lead to serious health problems. In fact, when energy drinks are combined with ephedra, it can cause acute psychosis, according to an article that was published in the journal Medicine, Science, and Law back in 2001.

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