blogginess

A study in extremes?  A mar­ket­ing fad-wagon?  A good idea?

Promis­ing a “vaca­tion in a bot­tle” or an “acupunc­ture ses­sion in every can,” mak­ers of anti-energy drinks, as they’re known, say that after bailouts, fore­clo­sures and Ponzi schemes, Amer­i­cans nowa­days would rather chill out than tweak out. To help us do so, they’re spik­ing their new bev­er­ages with ingre­di­ents such as chamomile, mela­tonin, and valer­ian root — all known for their sup­posed calm­ing effects.

To be sure, there are def­i­nitely some ben­e­fits to offer­ing mod­ern human­ity more ways to just calm down.  Intro­duc­ing the main­stream to plant med­i­cines such as valer­ian root and kava kava root are also pluses as I see it.  How­ever, these treat­ments need to be more widely under­stood and used if we hope to break our toxic depen­dence on west­ern med­i­cines “treat the symp­tom, not the dis­ease” disease.

As anti-energy drinks gain in pop­u­lar­ity we’ll surely begin to see ever more research on the com­pounds that give the drinks their mel­low.  This will lead to warn­ing labels, con­flict­ing health advice from com­pet­ing drink mak­ers’ mar­ket­ing depart­ments, and fear-mongering of potent plant-based med­i­cines such as valer­ian and kava.  Fur­ther, there have already been stud­ies which have proven that kava lac­tones, the active ingre­di­ent in kava kava can be dam­ag­ing to the liver (made worse if com­bined with alco­hol!) .  This research just under­scores the impor­tance of using these herbs in their whole state, rather than extract­ing the potenet lac­tones and divorc­ing the med­i­cine from the com­plex of vit­a­mins, min­er­als, and flavi­noids that mit­i­gate and bal­ance these strong medicines.

Mela­tonin is also being used in these drinks, and while mela­tonin is a naturally-occurring hor­mone in our brains, it’s the one that reg­u­lates our sleep.  Mess­ing with the bod­ies equi­lib­rium by intro­duc­ing added doses of hor­mones, amino acids, etc. can have all sorts of unde­sired effects (i.e. insomnia).

Ulti­mately, i am of the opin­ion that this newest trend in bev­er­age mar­ket­ing will be the most destruc­tive yet.  These prod­ucts WILL be abused because they are mind/body alter­ing sub­stances and peo­ple seems to really love that shit.

via Daily Finance