Doctors warn energy drinks make kids ask for the quarterly numbers
Doctors warned families that energy drink caffeine harms kids' hearts. We confirmed that, then found something worse.
"...and by the second can he had scheduled a follow-up," my assistant said on Sunday, while a nine-year-old asked her for the quarterly numbers. We wrote it down. It is in the paper.
Doctors have warned for years that energy drinks put far too much caffeine into children. We checked. They are right. The heart rate goes up and stays up. That part of our study is correct and dull, and we moved on from it quickly.
Then we gave twenty-six children one can each. A second group got water. That is the control group. It is the children you do not give the thing to, so you can see what the thing did. Within forty minutes the can group had elected a chair. The water group was still eating sand.
The can group set an agenda. They used the phrase "circle back" without being taught it. A six-year-old asked who owned the action item, and nobody did, and he sighed like a man of fifty. Our p-value was very small. That is the chance we saw all this by accident. It is small.
"We are not saying the drinks are dangerous. The doctors already said that. We are saying childhood ends at the first sip and a performance review begins."
We hedge, of course. It is one study. But the can group has since asked us to take this offline, and one of them has copied his mother.
