Throughout the fourteen day experiment I thought about cheating a few times. Well, maybe cheating is too strong of a word but none the less, I thought about consuming caffeine on multiple occasions. I even thought about how I would incorporate my lack of will power into my blog posts and with each temptation, I would find myself trying to justify it a little bit more. Even though I was enticed, I was able to abstain from caffeine and endure some painful withdrawal symptoms.
There was a topic of conversation I had with a co-worker that I left out of an earlier post and it had to do with so called herbal or non-caffeinated energy products. I had left it out because I had thought about it before and I wanted to do a little bit of research before I commented on the subject. It started when my co-worker and I were inside of a gas station convenience store waiting to make a purchase. I started to notice products that were mounted on a counter top display case that were advertised as herbal supplement energy products. Now I should add that my co-worker, throughout the fourteen day experiment has been trying to “help” me out by suggesting alternatives such as decaf coffee and at first, these supplements seemed like a viable alternative to caffeine but with a little bit of investigating, I found some interesting facts about them.
First, these non-caffeinated products seemed to have some… how should I say… male sexual innuendos in their titles such as Rock Hard, Stay-Up and so on. Not to mention that these products are also located with condoms at convenience stores. Second, as I started to look at the ingredients list a little but closer, I found some interesting information. Where these products lack caffeine they put a huge amount of B-vitamins. Most of these products pack well over 500% vitamin B6 and B12. I’m no doctor but processing 400% more B-vitamins that the body needs can’t be good for your kidneys.
