FDA Discusses Energy Drinks with Top Senators 12-12

FDA Discusses Energy Drinks with Top Senators

Richard Blumenthal

December 11, 2012 

FDA’s interest in energy drinks is really starting to ramp up. Last month, the agency listed on its website all adverse event reports linked to leading energy drink brands since 2004. Now, we have a meeting between FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, and Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

A joint statement released last Thursday by the two senators indicates that, during their meeting with Hamburg, they urged FDA to convene an expert panel on caffeine and stimulant consumption no later than early next year. Blumenthal and Durbin would want such a panel to focus on potential health effects from child and adolescent consumption of caffeine and other stimulants found in energy drinks, and potential interactions between these stimulants.

Labeling is another area of concern, as the senators’ joint statement says they’ve requested that FDA take swift action regarding findings that some major energy drink brands may contain more than 20% their stated caffeine levels. The statistic likely came from this Consumer Reports investigation   on 27 leading energy drink products.

Senators Blumenthal and Durbin are reportedly confident that FDA is taking energy drink concerns seriously.

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Caffeine improves recognition of positive words 11-09

Caffeine improves recognition of positive words

PLoS | November 8, 2012 | Psychopharmacology / 

Caffeine perks up most coffee-lovers, but a new study shows a small dose of caffeine also increases their speed and accuracy for recognizing words with positive connotation.

The research published November 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Lars Kuchinke and colleagues from Ruhr University, Germany, shows that caffeine enhances the neural processing of positive words, but not those with neutral or negative associations.

Previous research showed that caffeine increases activity in the central nervous system, and normal doses of caffeine improve performance on simple cognitive tasks and behavioral responses.

It is also known that certain memories are enhanced when strong positive or negative emotions are associated with objects, but the link between caffeine consumption and these emotional biases was unknown.

This study demonstrates, for the first time, that consuming 200 mg of caffeine, equivalent to 2-3 cups of coffee, 30 minutes before a task can improve the implicit recognition of positive words, but has no effect on the processing of emotionally neutral or negative words.

The authors suggest that this effect is driven by caffeine’s strong dopaminergic effects in the language-dominant regions of the brain.

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