Energy Drink Ingredients

Caffeine

The most common stimulant, found also in coffee, Coke, and Mountain Dew but usually is found in much higher quantities in energy drinks.

Taurine

Taurine is an amino acid that your body naturally produces. It helps regulate heartbeat, muscle contractions, and energy levels.

Guarana

Guarana comes from plants native to South America. Amazonians have used it for a long time to increase alertness and energy. It’s more dense in caffeine and coffee beans.

B Vitamins

These are essentially the things that help you convert food to energy, like sugar which is found in abundance in energy drinks.

Ginseng

Ginseng, an adaptogenic herb, is known to increase energy, has some anti-fatigue components, supposedly relieves stress, and increase memory.

Ginkgo Biloba

This ingredient is named after the rare tree it originates from. It is believed to help with memory retention, concentration, circulation, acts as an anti-depressant, and even shows signs of helping people with Alzheimer’s.

L-Carnitine

An amino acid usually created by your liver and kidneys, this stuff helps up your metabolism and energy levels. Because of the way it interacts with your body, it may act as a thermogenic and help increase weight loss and endurance during exercise.

Sugars

Glucose is the body’s preferred fuel. That’s why you get hyper with a lot of sugar. Energy drinks contain a ton of sugar. Therefore, energy. It’s a carbohydrate and a lot of exercise regiments suggest a good dose of carbs for workouts lasting more than an hour.

Antioxidants

Anti-oxidants are things that help your body gracefully recover from the damage of free radicals. Vitamin C is an anti-oxidant, so claiming that your energy drink has a lot of anti-oxidants is like saying you’re buying really expensive orange juice.

Glucuronolactone

Glucuronolactone (DGL) occurs naturally in the human body as glucose is broken down by the liver.

Yerba Mate

This substance is derived from leaves of a shrub in the Holly family.

Creatine

Creatine is naturally obtained by eating meat. Creatine helps with supplying energy to the muscles and is usually found in energy drinks and products that are marketed to body builders.

Acai Berry

This ingredient is finding its way into more and more energy drinks. Acai berry comes from the Acai Palm tree which is found in South America.

Milk Thistle

This ingredient mainly found in Rockstar and a few other drinks is used as a liver detoxifying agent.

L-theanine

L-theanine is an amino acid that according to recent studies has shown to calm the brain to enhance concentration.

Inositol

Inositol was once considered a B vitamin, but has since been removed from this classification because the human body is able to produce it’s own supply without the need for supplementation through the diet.

Artificial Sweeteners

Many energy drinks contain artificial sweeteners. Even energy drinks that contain high amounts of sugar will include artificial sweeteners to help cover the medicinal taste of the other energy drink ingredients.

Brochure examples

History of energy drinks

Demand for energy drinks has steadily increased since they first came onto Western markets in the early 1990s, so we have all assumed that they are a relatively recent addition to the recreational drinks available through Energy Drinks.

Energy based drinks have been around in Japan since 1962, when Taisho Pharmaceuticals released a drink called Lipovitan-D. This drink contained vitamins B1, B2 and B6 as well as niacin and taurine. All ingredients designed to increase concentration and energy. This drink and others like them became extremely popular in Japan, Thailand and Korea, especially among the working-class who needed that boost of energy throught the day.

These drinks were also produced in other countries much earlier than the 1960s. For example, Irn-Bru was Scotlands equivolant in the early nineteen hundreds. Then Lucozade entered the market in nineteen twenty nine for use in the British hospital system, assisting patients in replenishing their lost energies. Whether or not these drinks had similar ingredients to Lipovitan-D is a matter for conjecture, but they were marketed as energy boosters.

The most well known energy drink to hit the Western markets was Red Bull, introduced by an Austrian entrepreneur who had tasted energy drinks on a trip to Thailand. Through a partnership agreement with the Thai manufacturers, Dietrich Mateschitz brought the drink back to Europe, adapted it for Western tastes and began selling it early in the 1990s.

HOW DID I USE TECHNOLOGY REPORT

How I Produced My Images

I went to PA.16 to do my photo shoot with Liam, Sherrie, Elliot and Nicholas. I wasn't originally
going to do it with several other people and did do so but the photo's never turned out as i had hoped
so i did it again with said people. I spent half a lesson planning the new photo shoot like who to take
and where it would be suitable to host. Eventually i came up with the room in collage with the infinity wall and went there.


 During the photo shoot in PA.16 there was a lot of moving about of the models and trying new
 and different positions to capture the best images passable. There was also a lot of change in the
 lighting to cast shadows and brighten up the room to get a better photograph. I altered the brightness to make the photo's more harsh or softer to give the photographs different affects. Also i used different positions and positioned my self differently to get different angles on the photographs.


After taking my photographs and looking at them on the computer did i realise that not all of them were usable due to camera shake or poor lighting condition due to the lighting experimentation. But the photographs that I salvaged from the many i had taken are adequate to use for my work and I'm best pleased with the way they had turned out.

Energy drink research

Energy drinks were an active subset of the early soft drink industry, which was originally dominated by pharmacists. Coca-Cola, for instance, was originally marketed as an energy booster; its name was derived from its two active ingredients, both known stimulants: Coca leaves and kola nuts (a source of caffeine).

(Fresh coca leaves were replaced by "spent" ones in 1904 because of concerns over the use of cocaine in food products.)

In the UK, Lucozade Energy was originally introduced in 1929 as a hospital drink for aiding recovery. In the early 1980s, it was promoted as an energy drink for replaceing lost energy used thruought the day.

One of the first energy drinks introduced in America was Dr. Enuf. Its origins date back to 1949, when a buisness man from Chicago named William Mark Swartz was convinced by his fellow coworkers to create a soft drink filled with vitamins as an alternative to sugar sodas full of empty calories.

In Japan, the energy drink dates at least as far back as the early 1960s, with the release of the Lipovitan. However, most such products in Japan bear little resemblance to soft drinks, and are sold instead in small brown glass medicine bottles or cans styled to resemble such containers. A South Korean drink closely modeled after Lipovitan, also appeared in the early 1960s, and targets a similar demographic.