Who would have thought that pumping cheap, colorful caffeine bombs into every gas station across the country could be bad for public health?
Most people probably at least suspect that energy drinks aren’t the best thing to ingest into our bodies. However, a recent preliminary study of American Heart Association found that the impact of energy drinks on the human heart over time is worse than you imagine.
The new research examined more than 28,300 health conditions reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2017 and 2025. Overall, researchers found that energy drinks and highly caffeinated drinks have a much stronger link to serious heart disease than that of non-ultra-caffeinated drinks.
In more detail, the study found that energy drinks were cited 11 times more often in reports of cardiac arrest than non-caffeinated products. And although caffeine is a key ingredient contributing to adverse health effects like heart attacks and ventricular arrhythmia, energy drinks are often mushes of methylxanthines, sympathomimetics, yohimbine and other poorly understood ingredients.
As the researchers found, documents about serious medical episodes involving mentions of energy drinks and other stimulant drinks are about four times more likely to include cases of arrhythmia than medical reports that do not. The study summary also highlights a growing number of cases reported by healthcare professionals involving irregular heartbeat or sudden cardiac death in otherwise healthy young adults who regularly drink energy drinks.
Importantly, the findings highlight a high number of adverse cardiac outcomes among young adults aged 18 to 34, for whom heart disease is generally rare. American adults in this age group tend to be the primary consumers of energy drinks, which could reflect the fact that consuming large quantities of energy drinks is, in fact, hard on your ticker.
However, the study authors point out that any causal link between high energy drink consumption and poor heart health has not yet been proven, as the body of research on the subject is relatively young.
Although the research has not yet been peer-reviewed, it could nonetheless indicate a growing public health crisis – not due to a lack of resources, as is so often the case, but due to the situation being too dire.
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Gn Health
