5 Hour Energy Side Effects?

Caffeine Overdose

You've probably heard this one before - the story of the kid who drank twelve Monster energy drinks and went into a coma, or the woman who drank eight cups of coffee and jump-started an arrhythmia in her heart. Unless you've been living under some sort of stone-like substance for most of your life, you know caffeine is bad for you in huge doses. It's a given.

5 hour energy is no exception. The commercials claim that it has "at least as much caffeine as a premium cup of coffee." Researchers at Consumer Reports have independently verified that one bottle of 5 hour energy has approximately 200 mg of caffeine, or about 20 mg more than an 8 oz cup of Starbucks coffee.

Big whup, right? People drink coffee everyday, and they seem fine, at least, most of the time. The problem is, one shot of 5 hour energy is less than two fluid ounces of actual liquid. When it comes to killing yourself with coffee or full-sized energy drinks, you have to jump the volume hurdle first. Not so with 5 hour energy; side effects may set in after only three or four of them (depending on your caffeine threshold), or at around eight ounces of liquid. The bottle explicitly says to not take more than two a day, but, c'mon, do people ever really listen to warnings like that?

Niacin Overdose

According to Mayo Clinic (which is not, as the name would suggest, a clinic devoted to delicious sandwich spreads), symptoms of Niacin overdose include flushing of the skin, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, itching, nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and hepatoxicity (liver damage, to the layman).

Niacin is prominently featured as an ingredient in five hour energy, but, thankfully for your stomach and liver, most people would need to consume about 12 before they saw any sort of damage from Niacin, by which time the caffeine probably would have landed you in the hospital anyways. Of course, everyone is different in terms of what their body can handle, and some can and do react extremely poorly to smaller amounts of Niacin. Use caution.

Loss of Coordination

After about five bottles of 5 hour energy, users may experience marked clumsiness or loss of fine-motor control. This is due to an overdose of vitamin B6, which you can find about 40 mg of in one five hour energy. In the most severe cases, temporary paralysis can even occur.

This may not seem like a big deal - everyone gets clumsy when they're tired, after all - but in the wrong situation, this could be catastrophic. Say some poor overworked guy at a nuclear reactor takes some five hour energies to stay awake, but is then paralyzed by it, and has to watch helplessly as the reactor melts down and blows up the neighboring city of puppies and bunnies? Yeah, it could happen.

This Author's Conclusions

Okay, so, despite my desire to find something sinister to write about five hour energy, I really couldn't. The side effects are minimal if you take it in proper doses as dictated by the label, and even if you didn't, you'd have to at least double or triple the dose before anything as bad as "loss of coordination" occurred. You win this round, five hour energy...for now.