This story, published in partnership with The Examination, is part of an investigative collaboration involving The Examination, The Bristol Cable, Daraj, Investico, Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, Der Standard, and the Toronto Star.
On a winter morning in a Long Island town about two hours east of New York City’s skyscrapers, a Dutch researcher told local officials that their concerns about mixing heavily caffeinated energy drinks with alcohol were overblown.
A few months earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had effectively banned Four Loko, a caffeinated malt liquor dubbed “blackout in a can” by college students. Suburban Suffolk County was now considering something more sweeping: a ban on selling energy drinks to minors.
Joris Verster, an academic from Utrecht University, said there was no scientific basis for the law. Though booze and energy drinks are often consumed together, Verster argued that beverages like Red Bull aren’t to blame for bad things that happen when people get drunk.
He offered an analogy that might resonate with locals; Suffolk County includes the beach towns that inspired the thriller “Jaws.” Blaming energy drinks for binge drinking and alcohol-fueled injuries, he said, would be like blaming shark attacks on summertime ice cream sales.
“The shark attacks are not caused by the ice cream sales,” Verster said in the February 2011 hearing.
He was one of three scientists who had crossed the Atlantic to urge officials to drop the proposal. The others were a British professor and Red Bull’s chief scientific officer. The trio shared more than a research interest: Through paychecks or research grants, all three had gotten money from Red Bull, the world’s largest energy drink company.
Their argument won the day. Lawmakers dropped the age limit, marking an early victory for the Austria-based company in what would become a global campaign to use science to combat restrictions on its products.
For more than a decade, Red Bull paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for university professors to conduct research that has been favorable to the energy drink industry, a joint investigation involving The Examination, The Bristol Cable, Daraj, Investico, Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, Der Standard, STAT, and the Toronto Star found. The company has flown academics to U.S. cities and provided talking points for meetings with government officials who were considering restrictions on energy drinks. It funded a doctorate for a researcher in the United Kingdom and another in the Netherlands.
In the United States and Canada, research backed by Red Bull or conducted by academics with financial ties to the company has been used to defeat measures such as age restrictions and warning labels.
A pivotal report by a European food agency in 2015 cited these studies in finding that there wasn’t clear evidence that mixing energy drinks and alcohol was harmful. That report remains the last word in Europe and has been used to prevent action elsewhere.
The studies backed by Red Bull have been nearly unanimous in their message: Consuming energy drinks and alcohol together is no more harmful than drinking alcohol alone.
That stands in stark contrast to the vast majority of independent studies on the subject.
The Examination gathered more than 100 studies about the health or behavioral risks of mixing energy drinks and alcohol. Of the studies that received funding by Red Bull or were conducted by researchers who disclosed financial conflicts of interest with the company, 95% concluded that mixing alcohol with energy drinks did not increase those risks. Roughly 80% of independent studies reached the opposite conclusion, The Examination found.
Companies often fund research into controversial products, a practice that is criticized by health advocates. But leading alcohol researchers who reviewed some of the studies with financial ties to Red Bull said there are deeper problems.
A number of the studies are flawed, they said, raising questions about their conclusions. In Boston, a team of scientists withdrew from a Red Bull-funded study after Verster, the Dutch researcher, refused to address problems they believed would bias the results.
In a brief statement to The Examination and its partners, Karlheinz Niederreiter, Global Head of Science, Regulatory and Government Affairs at Red Bull, wrote, “Health authorities across the world have concluded that Red Bull Energy Drink is safe to consume.” That’s why, he wrote, nearly 14 billion cans were sold worldwide last year.
Niederreiter and other Red Bull executives did not answer questions about the news outlets’ findings, including those about the safety of consuming energy drinks with alcohol.
Voluntary guidelines published by American and European industry groups say their member companies, which include Red Bull and Monster Beverage Corp., don’t promote mixing energy drinks with alcohol and don’t claim that energy drinks counteract the effects of alcohol. The European group said academic research has found that mixing the two doesn’t pose additional risks.
Peter Miller, a professor at Deakin University in Australia, said the news outlets’ findings weren’t surprising. Back in 2013, around the time that much of this research was published, he wrote an essay in a medical journal criticizing the wave of industry-funded studies about mixing energy drinks and alcohol.
Those research grants are “an investment using universities’ reputation to be able to influence policy,” Miller told The Examination. “This is a campaign to protect their profits and to avoid legislative intervention.”
And it’s worked, he said. Red Bull-funded researchers have “absolutely undermined the evidence base,” Miller said. “It leads to this doubt where politicians don’t act.”
Much of this research was conducted at a time of growing public debate about the safety of energy drinks. Especially for young people. And especially in combination with alcohol.
Wide-awake drunk
One weekend night in August 2016, Zachary Mitchell joined some friends for a getaway at a lakeside cottage in Quebec. The 21-year-old visited the cottage nearly every summer weekend, his mother said.
Mitchell drank several cans of Red Bull and about six beers over about two hours before he and his friends decided to go for a swim, according to a coroner’s report.
Mitchell had been born near a lake and learned to swim from a young age. “He was a fish,” said his mother, Heather Mitchell.
But shortly before midnight, Mitchell hit the water awkwardly when he dove from a 15-foot-high deck. He briefly resurfaced, spoke a few words, and went under again. That was the last his friends saw of him, according to a coroner’s report.
The coroner wrote that Mitchell had drowned, likely due to an arrhythmia triggered by the combination of energy drinks and physical exercise. She noted that he had a blood alcohol content of about 0.1%, slightly over the legal limit for driving.
In her report, she called for a “vast advertising awareness campaign targeting a young audience” about the risks of energy drinks, including those from combining them with alcohol.
Researchers have a term that captures their concern about mixing alcohol and energy drinks: wide-awake drunk.
Tim Stockwell, who headed the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research from 2004 to 2020, said adding the stimulation of energy drinks to the impaired judgment caused by alcohol is a recipe for risky behavior.
The caffeine in energy drinks ranges from 80 mg in a Red Bull, slightly less than a typical cup of coffee, to 300 mg in other brands. But energy drinks also contain ingredients such as taurine and guarana that can magnify its effects on the body.
“It’s a pretty potentially dangerous combination, giving you the energy to do crazy, daft things,” Stockwell said, “and something that takes away the fear of the consequences.”
People have been hurt or killed all over the world after consuming alcohol and energy drinks, according to news reports. In England, an 18-year-old woman suffered three cardiac arrests after downing 10 Jägerbombs, a cocktail that combines an energy drink with the spirit Jägermeister. In Washington state, a 17-year-old boy died of acute alcohol intoxication after mixing hard liquor and energy drinks while playing video games with friends. In Quebec, a 14-year-old girl was found dead behind her school after consuming a caffeinated alcoholic drink called FCKD UP.
A considerable body of research suggests that incidents like these aren’t just chance or circumstance. Mixing alcohol and energy drinks was linked to higher rates of binge drinking, sexual abuse and drunk driving, according to a study conducted among U.S. college students. Another study of hospital patients in Canada found the combination was tied to higher levels of injury; among women, the risk of injury tripled.
Health authorities have shared these views. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that mixing alcohol and energy drinks can lead to more drinking and a greater risk of injury, drunk driving, and unwanted or unprotected sex.
This research was just emerging back in 2010 during a string of deaths involving young people and Four Loko. The FDA acted quickly, ordering Four Loko and other companies to stop selling caffeinated alcoholic drinks.
At the time of Mitchell’s death, energy drinks in Canada carried a warning saying not to mix them with alcohol. The coroner investigating his death criticized those warnings, writing that they were “insufficient” and “in small print.”
Heather Mitchell said that neither she nor her son were fully aware of the risks of energy drinks. She said she really didn’t know if he frequently drank them. She assumed that if they were on the shelf, they were safe.
Red Bull gets into the research business
In 2011, soon after becoming director of an injury prevention research center at Boston University, Jonathan Howland joined two Red Bull executives for dinner. One of them was Niederreiter, who was in charge of science for the company. Lobster was on the menu and a scientific collaboration was taking shape.
Howland, who believed the FDA had overstepped the evidence with its ban on caffeinated alcoholic beverages, had taken note of ongoing research by Verster, the Dutch professor. The two ran in similar academic circles; both were members of a small group of researchers who studied alcohol hangovers. Verster’s preliminary findings suggested that mixing alcohol and energy drinks did not cause people to drink more or suffer higher rates of harm.
When Verster said he wanted to replicate his study in the United States, Howland didn’t hesitate. “I just jumped on it,” he said in an interview. That led to a deal between Red Bull and Boston University.
The key to Verster’s research was that he didn’t look for differences between people who drank only alcohol and people who consumed both alcohol and energy drinks, Verster told The Examination. Instead, he built his studies around people who did both, comparing outcomes between when they consumed alcohol alone and when they consumed it with energy drinks.
This eliminated variables such as personality type and enabled him to test for causality, Verster said.
But several months after Howland and his team started the project, they discovered a problem in how the study was set up. The details of the dispute were laid out in emails, study documents, and interviews with Howland and Tamara Calise, who consulted with the Boston team as a research expert.
The Boston researchers were alarmed because the survey that Verster’s team had provided defined alcohol mixed with energy drinks to include only alcoholic beverages consumed within two hours of an energy drink. That could underestimate binge drinking and harm linked to energy drinks, Howland’s team determined. There was no restriction on which drinks were counted when participants drank alcohol alone.
Howland and his colleagues urged Verster to change his approach. Verster refused. Howland said the message was clear: that “if you want the money, you do it exactly the way we tell you.”
Howland’s team ultimately decided to back out of the study.
“We decided that we cannot use our university positions and professional reputations to recruit for a study that we believe cannot test important hypotheses in an unbiased way,” Howland wrote to Verster in June 2012.
That didn’t seem to affect Red Bull’s support of Verster’s research. Later that year, he and four colleagues published a study of Dutch students, funded by the company, that used the disputed approach and came to a surprising conclusion: People were better off when they mixed alcohol with energy drinks than when they drank alcohol alone. When they combined the two, they drank less alcohol and were less likely to suffer harmful consequences, the study concluded.
Five alcohol researchers consulted by The Examination said they agreed with the Boston researchers that the approach by Verster’s team was flawed. The half-life of caffeine is five to six hours — meaning that five to six hours after someone ingests caffeine, half of it remains in their system and continues to affect them. That’s significantly longer than the time window used by Verster.
From 2016 to 2021, Verster and other Red Bull-funded scientists in the U.K. and Australia published at least five more studies that used the same definition of mixing alcohol and energy drinks. All concluded that mixing did not lead to increased drinking or harm.
Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco who has examined research funded by the food and beverage industry, described those studies as “marketing dressed up as science.”
William Kerr, scientific director at the federally funded National Alcohol Research Center, said, “Aspects of the studies seem biased to deliver counterintuitive results that support industry perspectives.”
In an email to The Examination, Verster acknowledged that the Boston researchers raised questions about the study methodology. He said he didn’t change it because he wanted the study to be comparable to his earlier research.
Regarding his definition of mixing of alcoholic and energy drinks, he wrote that the two-hour limit was meant to exclude energy drinks consumed much earlier in the day, not to limit the number of alcoholic drinks counted.
Utrecht University investigated potential conflicts of interest in Verster’s partnership with Red Bull more than a decade ago. The university determined that Verster was insufficiently transparent because he had been paid through his own company for studies that cited his university affiliation. However, the university concluded this wasn’t a breach of integrity.
After recent inquiries by the Dutch news outlet Investico about Verster’s studies, the university said that Verster had run afoul of its policy governing outside-funded research. The university said it didn’t know the extent of that work and that it was a problem for Verster to continue to be paid privately while citing his university affiliation.
The university said the inquiries had “prompted internal questions” and that it was setting up a committee to investigate the “scientific culture and scientific quality policy” within Verster’s research group.
Verster, the most prolific among the Red Bull-backed researchers, denied that he violated ethical guidelines and said he stands by his research. He chalked up criticisms of his work to scientific disagreements.
Sean Johnson, whose doctorate was funded by Red Bull and who published several studies with Verster, has expressed reservations about how the Red Bull-funded research was conducted, the U.K.’s Bristol Cable has found.
Johnson reflected on his early research in a commentary submitted in 2023 as part of his doctoral submission. He wrote that research on mixing alcohol and energy drinks seemed to have become politicized; at times, going through the peer review process “felt like you were in the trenches.” Later, his perspective on that period shifted.
“I may have developed an unconscious bias towards my academic group and industry funders position,” Johnson wrote. In parentheses after “funders,” he wrote, “Red Bull GmbH.”
Johnson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
‘Science is science, regardless of who is funding it’
The number of studies with financial ties to Red Bull about the risks of alcohol and energy drinks is relatively small, but that body of research has been influential nonetheless. Reports on energy drink policy by government or advisory bodies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Ireland have cited these studies, The Examination found.
The most significant was a report by the European Food Safety Authority. As the European Union’s scientific adviser on food issues, its opinions not only inform policy in Europe, but also carry weight internationally.
In 2015, that agency released a sweeping report that broadly endorsed the safety of caffeine and energy drinks. Three sections addressing the combination of energy drinks and alcohol cited Verster’s studies.
The most detailed discussion was drawn from a 2014 study authored by Verster and three colleagues who had previously received Red Bull funding. They reviewed laboratory studies to determine whether mixing alcohol and caffeine caused people to get drunk without realizing it, a phenomenon known as “masking.” They concluded that masking was not a threat.
Though masking was a subject of research at the time, several alcohol researchers told The Examination, it’s not the most serious issue when it comes to energy drinks and alcohol. Far more significant, they said, is that energy drinks can prime people to drink more alcohol and that the combination of the two creates a sense of excitement and disinhibition — “wide-awake drunk.”
The European food authority’s report echoed Verster and his colleagues’ conclusion that masking — and more generally, mixing alcohol and energy drinks — was not a serious concern. The food authority’s report didn’t note that the studies disclosed researchers’ ties to Red Bull.
Silvia Valtueña Martínez, a European Food Safety Authority scientist who contributed to its 2015 report, defended its findings. The authors considered a wide range of research, she said, and industry-backed studies like Red Bull’s should not be discounted.
“Science is science, regardless of who is funding it,” she said.
Although the food authority recently said it would revisit its findings on caffeine and energy drinks, Malta Today reported that it doesn’t plan to address the risks of mixing energy drinks and alcohol.
For more than a decade, the food authority’s report has been a key reference regarding energy drinks in Europe and beyond; government and advisory bodies in the U.K., Canada, Germany, and other countries have cited it.
So too has the beverage industry, using it to argue against regulations on energy drinks.
One of those efforts was in Canada, several years after Mitchell’s death.
The alcohol warning label that was on energy drink cans when he died was the result of a temporary measure. In 2021, Health Canada, the country’s public health agency, proposed making the warning permanent, noting that mixing alcohol with energy drinks had been “identified as a public health concern.”
The beverage industry said there was no scientific basis for the warning label — and it had research to back up its position.
The Canadian Beverage Association sent Health Canada a letter citing three studies. All of them had authors who had received funding from Red Bull. The European Union joined in, cautioning against the labeling requirement and pointing to the European Food Safety Authority report.
A year later, Health Canada did an about-face, not only abandoning its proposal to make the warning label permanent, but dropping it altogether.
In a written statement, Health Canada told The Examination and the Toronto Star that it “relied heavily” on the 2015 European food authority report, as well as its own risk assessments, in making the decision. The agency said it considered “a broad range of information,” including published studies and stakeholder submissions.
Heather Mitchell called Health Canada’s decision “a clear dereliction of duty.”
Nearly a decade after she lost her son, energy drink cans in Canada provide less information about alcohol risks than they did on the night he died.
Aisvarya Chandrasekar, a computational journalist at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, contributed to the data analysis.
Léopold Salzenstein, a data reporter at The Examination, and Rachel Auslander, a freelance journalist, contributed reporting.
About The Examination
The Examination is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates global health threats. Sign up to get The Examination’s reporting in your inbox. Fill out this form if you would like to share a health problem after consuming energy drinks.