Poland does many things right

To be fair, it's the same amount of sugar as most other sodas and had less caffeine than a typical coffee. The real issue is that a lot of their marketing targets a younger audience who probably shouldn't be drinking caffeinated drinks yet.

Curious what you’d call them.

I don't think that's true anymore. The ban wasn't formally finalised and was quietly dropped during the pandemic. The store I work at still sells energy drinks to under 16s. We used to have to check, but they changed it and took the warning off our tills.

ETA: stores can implement their own policies though, if they do wish to age check people buying energy drinks.

Sadly, large amounts of caffeine were a way to control my ADHD when I couldn't afford medication. I still usually have an energy drink daily, even though I'm medicated now. At least that's less that what I used to do.

I was about to ask if he did something new, but then I realized that it wouldn't matter. That whole man is a "situation".

What did he do this time?

I can't speak much about Europe, but when I was in the beverage industry about 10 years ago, energy drinks often had ADDITIONAL ingredients (supplements) far beyond caffeine.

If you look on the back of those energy drink cans in the US, they don't say Nutrition Facts, they say Supplement Facts. That is important, it tells you how the item is classified and whether it has to follow FDA rules on Foods or FDA rules on Dietary Supplements (like vitamins do).

And if you look at the list of ingredients in many energy drinks (I have a tub of powdered GFuel before me so I'm refreshing my memory using that--it says "Supplement Facts"), you see a lot of ingredients like L-Tyrosine or L-Citrulline Malate which never appear in anything categorized as a food with the "Nutrition Facts" label on it. These fancy designer ingredients are basically newly-developed things that do not yet have a long-term proven track record of safety when eaten regularly on an everyday basis like a food.

A "food" is expected to be eaten regularly, so the standard of safety is higher for ingredients that go in a "food". There's a specific list the FDA has that lists ingredients considered GRAS (generally regarded as safe). New ingredients have to be evaluated by the FDA to determine whether they can be treated as GRAS, or if they have to have additional regulation if a corporation wants to put them in a food, drink, or supplement.

Corporations, unsurprisingly, LOVE to throw all sorts of newly created ingredients in things, for marketing purposes, so they do a lot of shady shit like labeling their product as a dietary supplement--but marketing it as a food so people think it's a food.

Something classified as a "dietary supplement" (as many energy drinks are) is not meant to be eaten regularly as a food item. It's meant to be consumed less frequently to SUPPLEMENT other things you consume or put in your body. However, people often treat energy drinks as a "food", as if they're the same thing as pop or juice, which could potentially be dangerous to your health because the ingredients in them have not yet proven they have a track record of safety when consumed frequently in food-like amounts. (I'm not really talking about caffeine here, I'm talking about all the OTHER stuff they throw in it.)

Whether a drink is classified as a "supplement" or a "food" is important. It is a big thing, because the regulations for what can be put into something that's a "supplement" is looser than what can be labeled as a "food".

I don't know exactly how Europe draws the lines or what the regulatory landscape is there regarding energy drinks, but it sounds like this ban is possibly because Energy Drinks tend to have ingredients that push the boundary on what is safe eaten in large amounts like a food and what might be more harmful like a drug. Europe is generally stricter than America when it comes to food safety.