Caffeine

Ingredient Name: Caffeine

Products it’s in:  b-vitamin energy drink (all 3 flavors!)

A few years ago I was on a Zoom call with my therapist. I must have been talking a mile a minute because she said, “Let’s get a piece of paper and go through how much caffeine you are having on a daily basis. Let’s count how much you’ve had today.” My first thought was: Let’s absolutely not do that because I know it is off the charts. At the time, I wasn’t even sure what a reasonable amount was, but I knew that I had definitely passed it. And for some reason, even though the surplus of caffeine was giving me anxiety, I was still drinking it. We added it up and I think it was between 600-800mg. 

So maybe that’s why I couldn’t sleep at night.

Back then, I would have pre-workout in the morning (200mg) and then an iced coffee or two, and maybe another preworkout or energy drink in the afternoon to give me a boost during that 3pm slump. The FDA has cited 400 milligrams a day as “an amount not generally associated with dangerous, negative side effects.” I don’t know about you, but “generally speaking” doesn’t give me much reassurance. 

I wanted to create an energy drink that I could have in addition to my morning coffee. Most energy drinks have about 200 mg of caffeine, and a cup of coffee has 95 mg. Each full-size serving of bia contains just 80 mg of caffeine, along with other natural energy-boosting ingredients like MCT powder. We’ve also added L-theanine, which can compound the attention and focus-boosting powers of caffeine while counteracting the jittery side effects.

Our current formulation of caffeine is chemically made. The starting materials are sodium theophylline. 4-amino-1,3-dimethyl-5-nitroso uracil. Synthetic caffeine and natural caffeine are chemically identical and have the same effect on the body, however some studies have found that the body absorbs synthetically-made caffeine slightly faster.