Why did we ban energy drinks at our youth clubs?

I came across a Facebook post today asking about energy drinks in youth clubs, particularly Monster, Rockstar and Red Bull. What surprised me was the overwhelming amount of responses saying they gave them out freely as refreshments, or sold them in tuck shops, and didn’t see a problem with doing so. That bugged me a little so I thought I’d take a minute to lay out why we took the decision to ban them from ours.

Wee little disclaimer. I’m not judging any adult who likes the odd energy drink. Go nuts! This post is about why I won’t give them to young people at our registered youth clubs.

1. They are illegal to sell to under 16s in the UK

Yup. We shouldn’t be selling them to younger teenagers anyway because we’re not allowed to. There was a lot of debate on this, and in the end, it was one of Theresa May’s very last pieces of legislation as Prime Minster. We believe that Christians should obey the law of the land so far as it doesn’t stop us from sharing the gospel.

2. They are hugely unhealthy

Although rare, there were quite a few high-profile incidents with adolescents consuming these drinks including seizures, delirium, rapid heart rate, strokes, and even death. In the US, in just four years visits to emergency rooms due to energy drink consumption doubled to nearly 21,000.

In the UK the NHS laid out all the ways energy drinks can complicate or even create health issues in young people including caffeine overdose, type 2 diabetes, late miscarriages, neurological and cardiovascular problems, poor dental health and obesity. There’s also reports of abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, headaches, breathing problems, insomnia, stress, jitters and tremors. Ouch!

Considering teenagers aren’t supposed to have more than 100mg of caffeine a day – and drinks like Rockstar and Monster nearly double that in one 500ml can with 160-200mg of caffeine – you can see why these problems occur. These are also synthetic caffeines, which are absorbed into the body far more quickly.

3. They emulate drinking culture

If you look at the advertising campaigns, logos, fonts, can sizes and shapes, the added colourings and flavours, then it really looks like they’ve tried hard to brand in the alcohol market rather than in the soft drinks market – yet they are still advertising to young people through video games and action sport. They’re sometimes called ‘transitional’ drinks because all these subversive associations can ease a underage person’s connection with certain alcohol brands.

This might be why it’s becoming even more popular to mix these drinks with alcohol which often happens underage (15% of teenagers reported to have mixed energy drinks and alcohol). It’s these mixed drinks that produce the most dangerous results for young people, and is a reason why many end up in emergency rooms.

4. They make life really hard work!

This isn’t a random cracking of the whip, we want to be consistent. We also stopped selling skittles from our tuck shop (which are an absolute party of calories, fat, sugars, and e-numbers!). We want to have fun with kids, and we do serve things like chocolate and even give out doughnuts. We also recognise, though, that their bodies are massively imbalanced and unpredictable chemistry sets. We draw the line on anything that is so overloaded that it’ll make them bounce off the walls. Fun – yes; hype – no. Silly nonsense yes; tumultuous explosions and devastating comedowns – nope.

We just don’t want to add to a culture that already makes teenagers massively stressed out and anxious. We’d like there to be feelings of peace, security, consistency and safety associated with our youth groups. I just can’t square that away with serving energy drinks – so we don’t.

All the best.

Photo by Jozsef Hocza on Unsplash