Red Bull paid university scientists for more than a decade to study whether mixing its energy drinks with alcohol is dangerous, and 95% of the studies tied to that money concluded it is not, according to a joint investigation by STAT News and The Examination published today. Roughly 80% of the independent studies on the same question reached the opposite conclusion, and regulators in the United States, Europe, and Canada cited the funded work when they backed away from age limits and warning labels.
Key takeaways
- Of more than 100 studies The Examination collected, 95% of those tied to Red Bull money found no added risk from mixing. About 80% of independent studies found the opposite.
- The funded work was cited in real policy decisions in Suffolk County, New York, at the European Food Safety Authority, and at Health Canada.
- Caffeine does not sober you up. It removes the drowsiness that normally tells you to stop drinking, which is how people end up what researchers call “wide-awake drunk.”
What happened
The investigation traced hundreds of thousands of dollars in Red Bull payments to university researchers over more than a decade. The company also flew scientists to US cities and gave them talking points for meetings with officials weighing restrictions, according to STAT.
In February 2011, three scientists flew to Suffolk County to testify against a proposed ban on selling energy drinks to minors, and all three had taken money from Red Bull. One of them, Utrecht University researcher Joris Verster, said blaming energy drinks for alcohol-related harm was like blaming shark attacks on ice cream sales. “The shark attacks are not caused by the ice cream sales,” he told the hearing. Lawmakers dropped the age limit.
In 2015 the European Food Safety Authority released a broad report endorsing the safety of caffeine and energy drinks. Three sections on alcohol mixing cited Verster’s work, STAT reported, and that report is still the last word in Europe.
Health Canada proposed in 2021 to make its alcohol-mixing warning label permanent, saying the combination had been “identified as a public health concern.” A year later it reversed course and dropped the label entirely.
Red Bull’s global head of science and regulatory affairs, Karlheinz Niederreiter, told the reporters that “health authorities across the world have concluded that Red Bull Energy Drink is safe to consume,” and noted that nearly 14 billion cans sold worldwide last year. Executives did not answer questions about the findings.
Dr. Kumar’s take
The pharmacology is where these studies break down. Caffeine does not lower your blood alcohol level, and it does not speed up how fast your liver clears alcohol. It blocks adenosine, the signal that builds up in your brain and makes you sleepy. Alcohol is a sedative, and that sedation is a brake. It is the reason a heavy drinker slumps on the couch instead of driving home or diving off a deck.
Take the brake off and you get someone whose judgment, reaction time, and balance are as impaired as ever, but who feels alert enough to keep going. That is the “wide-awake drunk” pattern, and in the emergency department I have seen what it produces: head injuries, falls, crashes, and palpitations in young people with structurally normal hearts. The caffeine did not make them safer. It made them awake.
Now consider how you would design a study to miss that. You would test one modest dose in a lab, not the four cans and eight drinks a 21-year-old actually consumes. You would measure a stand-in like reaction time on a computer task instead of real drinking behavior. And you would use a short observation window.
That last one is not hypothetical. STAT reported that Boston researchers withdrew from a Red Bull-funded study because the survey counted alcohol as “mixed” only if it was consumed within two hours of an energy drink. Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours, so half of it is still working on you that long after the can. A two-hour window drops most of the exposure you are trying to study. Jonathan Howland’s team wrote that they could not lend their university positions to “a study that we believe cannot test important hypotheses in an unbiased way.”
None of this proves a single study was falsified, and industry funding does not make a result wrong. But a 95% to 80% split in opposite directions is not what random error looks like. It is what a repeated design choice looks like.
What it means for you
Do not treat an energy drink as a way to sober up or to keep drinking longer. It does neither, and the feeling that it works is the hazard.
If you have a heart rhythm problem, high blood pressure, or take stimulant medication, be more careful still. I have written before about why coffee is safe for your heart, but energy drinks may not be: the dose, the delivery speed, and the other ingredients are not the same thing.
Keep the reading lesson too. When a study on a profitable product reports no effect, check the dose tested, the length of the observation window, and whether the outcome measured is the one that sends people to the hospital. If any of the three is too small, the null result was close to guaranteed before the first participant walked in.