Spoken from a health enthusiast perspective alone. What you will find in energy drinks that you won't find in coffee are several ingredients that either haven't been studied enough or are somewhat bad for you without the proper exercise to utilize them. Some of these ingredients are Taurine, L-Carnitine, Guarana, and Creatine. Most of which would be perfectly safe to eat. However whenever a food, or molecule is isolated they tend to lose most of their intended effects. This is postulated to be caused by a lack of the remainder of their structures that would help our bodies break them down. The best way to visualize this is looking at an apple that is healthy for you until you juice it. The literal fibers of the chewed apple prolong the digestion of sugars in your body which inhibits a spike of insulin. As it were most of these ingredients are isolated for energy beverages.
That being said the biggest problem energy drinks have are their tendency to incorporate immense amounts of sugar. Sugar is one of the single worst things one can consume. Huge in energy but originally hard to get; human bodies are not designed to digest it and the spikes in insulin caused by sugar are bad. So if you were planning on putting 9 tps of sugar into your coffee than I wouldn’t worry about drinking energy drinks, if you wouldn’t and were just looking for a caffeine boost than I would worry a fair amount.
There are other ways to get energy without drinking them. I am a huge fan of dark chocolate. It is extremely good for you when eaten correctly and will give you great energy boosts. Dark chocolate means any chocolate 75% dark or darker. I would also check to see the sugar quantities before eating. Give it a try because I used to like milk chocolate and now I gag at the sight. I would also suggest Yerba-Mate which contains caffeine and is very popular in your “Trader Joe’s” type energy drinks. Other energy boosters I have used and recommend, cinnamon, capsaicin or hot peppers, or even a tbs or coconut oil with chia seeds.
Finally use any of this information to do a little of your own research. It is always better to look up health information for yourself. If you have access to scientific journals that would be best however much of this information doesn’t have huge amounts of research which means you will have to put some trust in the folk lore side of a lot of these ingredients.
