He replaced coffee with energy drinks for a week — here is what happened

Journalist Jamie Waters from the Wall Street Journal decided to test the trend that has taken over gyms and offices: instead of daily coffee, energy drinks. For a whole week, he abandoned his regular latte and consumed a total of no less than 16.5 colorful cans. The journalist did not expect this experiment to completely change the way he looks at coffee.

Waters wanted to find out if it was a real "motivation juice"—which might even surpass coffee—or just a flashy marketing trap. An average can contains about 200 mg of caffeine—an amount equivalent to three shots of espresso or five cans of Diet Coke. According to Waters, the effect of the drink was immediate and particularly strong: he reported peak productivity, typing emails at a frantic speed, and a feeling of complete euphoria.

On one of the days, after drinking two cans in just four hours, he described a feeling of "floating on the moon" and the ability to get through busy work meetings with endless energy. However, alongside the surges of energy, side effects soon arrived. The sharp transition in caffeine dosages led to severe headaches, energy crashes in the afternoon hours, and a chemical aftertaste in the mouth due to the use of the artificial sweetener sucralose.

"Doctors warn that drinking two cans a day reaches the maximum recommended consumption threshold for an adult (400 mg), and remind that unlike coffee—which benefits from decades of safety research—the trendy energy drinks mainly have excellent advertising," Waters notes.

At the end of the week, Waters decided to abandon the fashionable cans and return to his familiar cup of coffee. According to him, although there is no doubt that energy drinks do provide a focused energy boost for the short term, the side effects, the price, and the industrial taste are not necessarily worth it. For those looking for productivity alongside maintaining health and enjoyment, good old coffee still beats processed energy substitutes.