Five Cans a Day
Brown urine. Yellow skin. A construction worker somewhere in Florida showed up at the doctor’s office wondering what was happening to his body, and when they ran the blood work, the numbers came back almost unreadable.
His liver enzymes were shot. Bilirubin—the bile pigment that makes your skin that sickly yellow—was way too high. But the really strange thing was the vitamin levels. B12, folate—they were so far above normal that the lab couldn’t actually measure them. The numbers just stopped making sense.
He drank maybe some beer here and there, kept himself reasonably healthy otherwise. But for the past few weeks, he’d been knocking back around five energy drinks every single day. Construction work is exhausting. The sun beats down, your body aches, and eventually you reach for whatever’s going to keep you upright. That was his solution.
The doctors eliminated everything else. Hepatitis, autoimmune disease, genetic stuff—nothing fit. What kept pointing back at him was the energy drinks. Manufacturers dump B vitamins and folate into these things by the megadose, marketing them as health boosters, brain fuel, endurance accelerators. Sounds good on the label. The problem is that too many vitamins is just as bad as too few, and when you’re drinking five cans a day, you’re not supplementing—you’re overdosing.
Most people get enough B vitamins and folate from regular food. You don’t need an energy drink to fix that. But the labeling creates this impression that you do, that you’re doing something smart by consuming these fortified concoctions. It’s a sales pitch disguised as health.
After he quit the drinks, his numbers came back down. His liver recovered. He got lucky in that way—his body had enough reserves to bounce back. Nothing dramatic happened, no dramatic moment of reckoning. Just a guy who got sick from something he thought was helping him, and who felt better once he stopped.