I am with you here, especially given that the examples listed in the article were basically:

* Some young man downed 6 beers and "several" energy drinks, then dove into a lake, and subsequently died. His mother said that he grew up near a lake and a was a good swimmer, so their conclusion was to blame energy drinks.

* An 18 year old woman downed 10 jagerbombs (a mix of jagermeister liquor and an energy drink) and subsequently had multiple cardiac arrests. The conclusion, again, was that it happened due to some unique properties of energy drinks, and not the fact that she consumed an equivalent of 10 energy drinks+10 shots of hard liquor in a short timespan. Too much of almost anything is bad, and I have no idea what other outcome was expected here after consuming crazy amounts of liquor and caffeine like this.

* A 17 year old man died from alcohol poisoning after mixing alcohol and energy drinks (unspecified amounts of each), and that's somehow the fault of energy drinks instead of alcohol.

I am just baffled that they couldn't find more convincing examples, given how they claimed it was such a serious and prevalent issue.

There seem to be heart issues involved in most of the energy drink related deaths. More specifically, people finding out they had heart issues, by dying.

So "those people just shouldn't drink caffeine then" would be the standard advice, except that some people apparently die before they realize that they're in that category. (It seems to be mostly young people? My country recently banned energy drinks for people under 18, they now check your age at the supermarket if you try to buy them.)

The strange thing is, if it's caused by caffeine, we'd also be hearing about people dying from having too many coffees, but you never hear about that. Maybe it's some of the other ingredients (taurine, guarana) or the combination?

I think the most convincing example isn't energy drinks but rather Panara bread's energy blaster drinks that they had to stop selling. [1] It seems like they used all the same ingredients common to a lot of energy drinks, but they used more of them.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/business/panera-lawsuit-charg...

>consumed an equivalent of 10 energy drinks+10 shots of hard liquor

a jagerbomb is not typically an entire energy drink. it's typically 3oz/90ml of energy drink. 10 jagerbombs would be ~3 redbulls. (which is still obviously a lot of energy drink and alcohol in a short time)