"More ADDICTIVE Than Cocaine" - Paul Saladino BREAKS DOWN Popular Energy Drink Dangers

So, I just have my guy go and buy a bunch of drinks, all right? I want you to go through them one by one. I got a Monster, I got Vitamin Water—which I think 50 Cent was a part of—I think even, uh, can you pull up if Kobe and 50 Cent were part of Vitamin Water?

You got Celsius, which is down here in Boca. You got Gatorade, which I want to be like Mike; he drank Gatorade. You got Red Bull, which I have one of the funniest stories with.

Maybe I'll tell you later. All right, so walk us through those drinks and why they're not good for you. So, like you said, in any of these drinks, you're going to find predictable ingredients.

In the Monster, because this is not a low-calorie Monster, you're going to find water and sugar as the first ingredients. Look, humans need carbohydrates, and I want to get into sugar with you—when it's good for humans and when it's bad for humans. We'll get into that later in the podcast, but after sugar, the ingredients here are essentially flavorings, caffeine, and a few vitamins.

You know, these energy drinks are basically sweet ways to package caffeine and other sorts of fake energy. Rob, Monster right now? Yes.

So, okay, if I look at this right now: Vitamin B2, Vitamin B3, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12—right? 260%, 250%, 24500%, right? Marketing-wise, that looks good.

It does. I'm getting a ton of vitamins. Right, okay, you are.

Then when I get into the ingredients, if you can zoom in a little bit more, which one is that? Monster or is that something else? Right, that's going to be as close as they let me get.

Um, is it okay? Well, let's see if you can find—well, the one you were on was fine, Rob. Just go back to that one because that was workable.

Is that the Monster one? Yes. Let me zoom in.

Which part of it is not good for you? Walk us through the ingredients. Okay, so the first ingredient here is carbonated water.

Carbonated water? Pretty benign, right? You take a Pellegrino, carbonated water, no problem.

If you were going to tell me there's side effects with, you know, we would have finished it right now. We're done. We're done.

Carbonated water—I have no problem with. The second ingredient is sugar, so maybe we need to have a little bit of a sugar conversation right now. Sugar is not bad.

Sugar is bad for humans, but not because of why you think it's bad for humans. When you strip sugar, which is sucrose—right? Sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose.

When you strip that out of a fruit or out of honey, for instance, you are removing it from a very complex food matrix full of hundreds, if not thousands, of other chemicals. Your body doesn't know what to do with pure sucrose, and the problem with pure sucrose is not that it raises your blood sugar. The problem with pure sucrose is that it causes overgrowth of the wrong type of bacteria in your gut.

Because all of these other hundreds, if not thousands, of chemicals that are in a banana, or an orange, or a strawberry, or a blueberry, or a raw organic honey actually temper the negative effects of sugar in your body; they prevent overgrowth of bacteria in your gut. So, whole foods are things that humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens and, previously, for millions of years as pre-human ancestors. Our body and our gut flora know what to do with these.

Strawberries don't cause diabetes; blueberries don't cause diabetes, and I would even say that raw honey doesn't cause diabetes. But sugar is a problem for humans because it affects your gut flora negatively, because it's devoid of all these chemicals that are naturally occurring in strawberries, honey, etc. —that are inherent in the whole fruit and that are essential to balance the gut flora when you consume this.

So, when you consume pure sugar, you are causing dysbiosis in your gut. This gets a little technical, but dysbiosis in your gut leads to increased levels of endotoxin in your body. Endotoxin is lipopolysaccharide, which is a gram-negative cell wall component.

Gram-negative is a type of bacteria; there are gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. A component of the gram-negative bacterial cell wall is lipopolysaccharide. When you have too much lipopolysaccharide in your gut, it moves through the gut into your bloodstream, and you get something called metabolic endotoxemia.

The same thing happens when you have high fructose corn syrup. So, high fructose corn syrup is made from corn. We can talk about that in conjunction with these multi-billion dollar corn lobbies that pressured producers to make—or, uh, I would say urged producers to make—more high fructose corn syrup versus regular corn, um, versus regular sugar.

But any type of processed sugar, I think, is harmful for humans because it affects your gut flora negatively, and that leads to this complex term, which is metabolic endotoxemia, and metabolic endotoxemia leads to dysfunctional metabolism, which is breaking your mitochondria. So, ultimately, if we zoom way, way out and we look at human health, metabolic dysfunction—which is also known as insulin resistance—can also lead to diabetes. It's on this spectrum of pre-diabetes.

This is at the core of so many, I would say, the vast majority of chronic diseases in humans. Ninety percent of what we spend our healthcare dollars on in the United States is chronic illness. Ninety percent of $4.

3 trillion a year is on chronic illness: obesity, diabetes, autoimmune conditions—all of which are preventable or reversible based on. . .

What we eat and how we live means that 90% of our healthcare dollars are going to treat conditions, which isn't really treating; it's just kind of band-aiding illnesses that are completely reversible and related to things like sugar and seed oils in our food. So if we go back to the Monster, I'll just finish that one up. Guys, yeah, we had sugar, and we talked a bit about why that's a problem.

The next ingredient is glucose, and glucose is a monosaccharide. By the way, I just want to show this while we're on the sugar topic: I just typed in right now, "What's more addictive, sugar or cocaine? " This is what came up from Ramse Healthcare UK: research on rats has found that sugar is more addictive than opioid drugs such as cocaine, and there can be withdrawal symptoms such as depression and behavioral problems when people try cutting out sugar completely.

I mean, that’s addicting—more than cocaine! In animal studies, there is evidence that it looks like it is very addicting when it's pure sugar. Yes, but strawberries are not addicting; right?

Blueberries are not addicting in the same way that pure sugar is. You don't live in our house; I mean, we have an issue with blueberries. That's okay; we're dealing with it.

We're really dealing with it! But blueberries are so healthy for humans because of all these other compounds that come with them. And I don’t think—like I said—sugar in a whole food package is harmful for humans.

Like I said, there is no evidence that honey even causes diabetes. There’s actually a randomized controlled trial in humans with diabetics where they gave them up to 120 grams, which is almost 7 to 8 tablespoons, of honey per day, and their insulin sensitivity got better. So we can talk about all these nuances, but if someone has diabetes and you eat fruit or you eat sugar, your body is not going to handle that sugar well.

But the fruit and the honey didn’t make you diabetic; it is these other ingredients in these foods or processed sugar affecting your gut microbiome. Explanation: Go back to that one, Rob, where you were at. It said, "No, honey doesn’t cause diabetes, but eating too much honey can increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Honey is a natural sugar that raises blood sugar. Eating too much honey or any type of sugar can lead to weight gain and increase your risk of developing type 2. Doctors may recommend that people with diabetes avoid honey and other sweeteners until their diabetes is well-managed.

" Do you agree with that? Not the second part. Okay, and I don't think someone with diabetes needs to be eating a lot of honey, but I want people to understand that honey isn't what gave them diabetes; it's seed oils, which are rich in an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat called linoleic acid.

And we'll get deep down the rabbit hole of seed oils; that linoleic acid accumulates in cell membranes and mitochondrial membranes, and that, I think, is really Ground Zero for what's causing metabolic dysfunction. But broken mitochondria, which is what we're talking about here ultimately on this podcast, is what makes people have chronic illness and metabolic dysfunction. Okay, let's go back to Monster, Rob; we're going to go through these drinks.

If you want to go back to Monster, go for it. Okay, so then we have glucose again. Glucose is a monosaccharide; sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide—it's fructose and glucose.

Citric acid is a preservative. Natural flavors? We don’t even know what that is, Pat!

They can make natural flavors, and it can be a lot of things. This is part of the problem with the FDA. This is an illustration of how the Food and Drg Administration is captured in the United States.

You have over 10,000 ingredients in our food supply that have come into the food supply through the generally recognized as safe designation—the GRAS designation. And the companies that put these compounds into our food do not have to do the proper safety trials; they can kind of grandfather them in, and the FDA now allows those companies to say, "Yeah, we tested it; it's safe," when there really haven't been any safety trials. So we don’t even know what natural flavors is.

Your grandmother doesn’t know what that is! What two great words to use, though, right? It’s like "pro-choice!

" The words are perfect; these are good words. Back in the day, life insurance used to be called death insurance—literally! And they called it life insurance because life is more marketable than death insurance, so people were willing to buy life insurance, right?

So "natural flavor" to somebody who's not in that space makes them think, "Honey, don't worry about it; this is natural flavor! " So it's effective; it's a good marketing stunt. You have no idea what that is!

And when we're talking about this verbiage, seed oils have really been rebranded as vegetable oils, which is something we'll get to, right? So there’s a euphemism there also. They’re not vegetable oils; they’re seed oils, but "vegetable oils" sound healthy.

Next, we're going on and we have taurine. Taurine is great! Taurine is a compound that occurs exclusively in animal foods.

It's a type of amino acid that has been associated with longevity across species, so taurine is probably great for humans. But guess what? Taurine is in meat.

Taurine is in your steak, your hamburger, and your chicken! Get taurine in animal foods. There are no plant foods with taurine, so that's a foreshadowing of the distinction between plant and animal foods for later in the podcast.

So, there's nothing wrong with taurine. Sodium citrate is another type of preservative. Color added; again, we have no idea what that is—what kind of coloring, how it affects our mitochondria, how it affects the gut.

That, to me, doesn't sound like a good thing. Color, artificial colors, we know the food dyes are problematic. Natural flavors is good; color added, to me, doesn't sound good.

Panax ginseng extract: I think that there's evidence that ginseng may have some benefits in humans. You know, I think Panax ginseng extract is one of the more benign things on this label so far. L-Carnitine is again another type of amino acid that occurs naturally in foods.

You can see the Latin root there: the carnal—the letters 'C-N' like in carnitine and carnosine are naturally occurring in meat, and they’re beneficial for humans. They’re antioxidants. I would rather that someone just eat a steak, preferably grass-fed, grass-finished, to get carnitine, but it's not the worst thing.

Then you have caffeine, and caffeine is an interesting one. So, caffeine belongs to a series of compounds known as methylxanthines. Theobromine in chocolate is another type of methylxanthine.

These compounds give us energy in some ways, but they can also make us jittery. They can cause blood sugar swings, they affect adenosine receptors in the brain, and they sort of forestall the onset of feeling sleepy. They don't really do good things for the human body.

Caffeine is not a vitamin; it's not essential for our biochemistry. I would argue that caffeine is sort of borrowing tomorrow's happiness today. This is an interesting expression: alcohol could also be considered borrowing tomorrow's happiness today.

You're sort of taking your bank account and bringing it forward. You're saying, "I'm tired, and I'm going to use this chemical crutch to feel less tired. " And you know that later in the day, when the caffeine wears off and your adenosine receptors are flooded with adenosine, you're going to feel more tired because it's a methylxanthine.

Caffeine also causes loss of electrolytes in your body, such as sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. So, caffeine does have negative, sort of diuretic effects. "Do you drink coffee?

" "I do not drink coffee. " "When's the last thing you had? " "COVID-19.

" "Years ago? " "Nineteen years ago. " "Nineteen years ago?

" "Yeah, when I was in physician assistant school before medical school. " Interesting! Okay, go back to Drp with Monster.

Let's see what else we got. So, caffeine—well, they have to put caffeine in there because that's why it gives you energy, right? That's why it gives you energy as the C.

I wonder if it's like across the board with everybody. Here it is. These are all going to be exactly the same.

So, sorbic acid actually says preservative, Pat, so they were forthcoming there; it's a preservative. Okay. Benzoic acid is a preservative.

How much have these been studied in humans? Do we know if these are safe? Do we know how they affect gut flora?

Not really—certainly something your great-grandmother would never have eaten. Niacinamide is a vitamin—it's essentially niacin—which is fine for humans. It's again found in many foods, both plant and animal.

Sucralose is an artificial sweetener, and there are some pretty big problems with sucralose. There are many in the health space who would say that artificial sweeteners are benign for humans, but again, my great-grandmother would not recognize this. There are studies in animals and humans suggesting that when you consume artificial sweeteners like sucralose or aspartame, or as sucralose with carbohydrates, it interferes with your body's normal insulin signaling.

So, it's not terribly surprising to suggest that when you consume something that your body perceives as sweet but actually has no calories associated, it would confuse your body at a neurological and metabolic level. Because historically, evolutionarily, humans have always consumed things that were sweet with calories—so honey has calories, a strawberry has calories, a raspberry has calories, a potato, right? A sweet potato; anything you're eating has calories.

So, these artificial sweeteners are potentially neuro-metabolically confusing for the body, and we know that they change the gut flora potentially in a negative way. So, I do not believe that artificial sweeteners are benign. And so again, we really have to ask the question: what is that doing to humans long-term?

Salt is fine; sodium chloride is totally fine. D-glucuronolactone—I’m not terribly worried about that. Inositol—again, some people find it helpful.

Guarana extract is actually a fruit extract. Okay. Pyridoxine hydrochloride—that's vitamin B6.

Riboflavin is vitamin B2. Multiex is another type of sugar. And the last ingredient is important to note: it's cyanocobalamin, which is a form of B12 that the human body doesn't really like.

So, there are multiple different types of that. The body doesn't really like it; it's potentially problematic because the cyano is a cyanide moiety. So, that's cyanide with your cobalamin.

Cobalamin is vitamin B12, but cyano is cyanide. So, it's a very small, small amount, but cyanide we know is a mitochondrial toxin. Whether or not that amount of cyanide is actually problematic for humans remains to be seen, but it probably needs to be studied more.

And I'll tell you this: there are many other forms of vitamin B12 they could put in there—methylcobalamin, adenosylcobalamin, hydroxycobalamin—which are not going to have any problems in the body. Human body, but they choose to put cyanocobalamin in because it's the cheapest. So Celsius actually came under fire for this recently.

Um, I've got a friend who actually called Celsius out for cyanocobalamin, and that was kind of a big deal. But all of these—if they have vitamin B12—will have cyanocobalamin. So all of them have the same thing; they all have cobalamin.

Yes, there is not a single energy drink that I've ever seen that has methylcobalamin. So, so, so. .

. Red Bull says calcium pantothenate (that's vitamin B5—that's pantothenic acid), but it just says "vitamin B12" at the end. It doesn't explain what kind of vitamin cobalamin it is.

So across the board, across the board: cyanocobalamin. All right, let's see what these guys are. Prime is also the same.

You're saying if Prime has B12, it's going to have the same thing. And actually, these guys say that it is, but does not. Yeah, and again, this is a form of—what's the difference?

What is the difference, actually, between Celsius, Monster, Prime, and Red Bull? Not a lot. Probably the amount of caffeine; some of them are going to use more artificial sweeteners and less sugar, different food dyes.

So this Gatorade is going to have some food dye in it. You know, this Monster—we didn't really see any food dyes; we did see artificial color, but they didn't tell us what it was. The Gatorade will list artificial colors; this may have a yellow dye in it.

This has Yellow No. 5. So the Gatorade actually has one of these food dyes that are almost certainly problematic for humans.

How about Vitamin Water? Let's see. I don't drink these, so I have to look at every ingredient list.

I'm sorry, guys—I mean, we can pull this up. It's actually pretty similar to what we've seen on these other ones—the forms of vitamins, some of which are okay, and some of which are not great for humans. The Vitamin Water actually uses fruit and vegetable juices for color, so they're doing a little bit better here.

But again, it's not great. They say reverse osmosis water is the first ingredient; great, they're giving us clean water. The second ingredient is crystalline fructose, so they have to make it sweet, and they're using pure fructose in this vitamin water.

And the problem with this: so fructose and glucose are two monosaccharides; fructose and glucose together are a disaccharide we know as sucrose. Pure fructose does not occur anywhere in nature; you cannot get pure fructose in nature. Fructose always occurs with glucose.

Fruit is connected with this sort of fructose name, right? So fructose occurs in fruit. A strawberry has fructose; honey contains fructose.

Anything that has sucrose contains fructose. So when they're making a pure fructose in this drink, you're creating something that humans have never seen, and we know very clearly from animal models that when you feed animals pure fructose, it causes dysbiosis in the gut; it causes overgrowth of the wrong type of bacteria in the gut. Because in your gut, in your intestines, you need glucose and fructose together for these to be absorbed properly.

This is what we've always done as humans—we never—there's no fructose tree, right? You can't just go out and consume pure fructose, but in so many studies with fructose, they will give animals or humans pure fructose, and that gets malabsorbed, meaning more of it stays in the gut, and then you get this problem again, which is dysbiosis. So, so many things that we are eating are assailing our gut microbiome and changing the balance there.

So here's a question, then: Is there anything you've heard Bobby Kennedy, RFK, talk about? If he ends up becoming, you know, one of the most. .

. biggest jobs that he's got—trillion and a half, I believe the budget is, if I'm not mistaken—it's a big number that he has. If he does bless you, what can he do that would massively disrupt the sports energy drink business?

I think the food dyes are a good place to start, and I think that, you know, again, right at this moment we're really hitting the intersection of health policy and business, and that's a tough one because I don't really think anything here on the table is healthy. So if you're doing these things, you are certainly negatively impacting your body. Now, what's the relative effect of that?

Could you drink this twice a week and be okay? Probably, but it's cumulative, right? So if you're drinking Vitamin Water, you're probably also drinking a Monster a few times a week, and then you're probably eating Chips Ahoy once or twice—I'm not passing judgment; I'm just trying to paint a picture.

You might be eating Pringles two or three times a week, and you're maybe cooking with seed oils or going to Chick-fil-A, which cooks in seed oils. You might be getting takeout one day a week from a Chinese restaurant that cooks in soybean oil. So you see, this is all cumulative.

So any one of these things—could you eat two Oreos a week and probably not impact your quality of life? Yeah, but at some point, it's all cumulative, and all of these things contain ingredients, especially the seed oils, which accumulate in our bodies. Some of these things contain ingredients that transiently affect our gut flora, but at some level, if you're consistently eating ultra-processed food with ingredients that your lineage would not recognize from two or three generations ago—great-grandmothers—you’re essentially tonically and consistently affecting your physiology negatively.

Okay, so then the question for me would be the following: So somebody who drinks these. . .

Drnks—it's part of their lifestyle to have one a day. Uh, sales offices—uh, guys who feel like they need a middle-of-the-day crash at 2:00 or 3:00 after they come back from lunch. And you're like, "Okay, Paul, so let's just say you're saying that.

How do I naturally increase my energy? What do I do for me not to have the, you know, afternoon crash? For me to wake up with a lot of fire and energy, what can I eat naturally to increase energy that doesn't affect me, you know, doesn't affect my health negatively?

" So the interesting answer to this question is it’s holistic, right? You kind of have to back up, and I can try and brainstorm in the moment and tell you what I would do if I needed more energy. But, it's also—you said you come back from lunch and you're crashing.

So, I'm going to ask you: What did you eat for breakfast, and what did you eat for lunch? Because sometimes it’s what you want to do for energy, and sometimes it’s things you should not be doing earlier in the day that are affecting your energy negatively. So, the first thing I would say is: How well did you sleep the night before?

Right? How much blue light did you have on your phone? How much TV did you watch?

How long were you scrolling? How much did you completely disrupt your circadian rhythm before you went to sleep? How dark is your bedroom?

Is it really dark, or is there a lot of light in which you’re changing your sleep quality? Because if you have a bad night of sleep—and again, you start to see that this really is all connected; everything is connected here—it’s hard to say this one thing is the answer. But if you had a bad night of sleep, you’re really not going to feel great.

You're not going to be as intelligent or as clear-thinking as you possibly could be. So, from the get-go, you are going to wake up cranky and foggy in your brain. You're going to crave junk foods, and if that's what's in your house, you're going to eat some Oreos, you're going to eat some chips, you're going to drink a Monster or a Celsius before you go to work, and you've essentially already set yourself up for a 2 PM crash.

There's really nothing you could do to avoid that, and then you're on this hamster wheel—you're on this vicious cycle. You cannot avoid that 2 PM crash. So, you have to do things as well as you can throughout the day.

I'm not trying to paint a picture that's impossible for people to do; I just want people to understand that it's connected with everything you do. Hey guys, I am Paul Saladino. You can find me on—man, if you have any questions about diet, health, recovering from chronic illness or autoimmune disease, I'm excited to connect with you guys all there, and I'll see you in there.

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