I’m going off of caffeine as of August 11th, when school starts. So today at lunch, I had a Monster, so I can get my fill before I’m done for at least 2.5 months. I was sitting with my brother, who’s a vegetarian. I asked him if he wanted a sip, and he said, “no thanks, I’m a vegetarian.” I asked him what this had to do with Monster, and he told me that it contained taurine, which was produced from animal tissue. I wasn’t so sure of this, so I did a bit of research (that is, as far as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers can be considered research).

Apparently, there are many ways of producing taurine (3). Taurine is an amino acid, and is found, amongst other places, in your long intestine. It’s a main ingredient in bile. While 10 years ago, the common method was to extract it from animal tissue, since 1998, a new method has been discovered, synthetic production. I’m not sure if it’s still considered organic, but through synthetic production, taurine is created via a chemical reaction, rather than scraped from animals livers.

Most energy drinks nowadays use synthetic production of taurine in their beverages. Red Bull does, Monster does, and as far as I looked, I couldn’t find an example of a manufacturer that used non-vegetarian taurine. However, interestingly enough, it hasn’t yet been proved that taurine actually gives energy. So why everyone seems to use it, I’m not quite sure. I did, however, go to Europe, and sampled a local energy drink called Burn. This drink contained no taurine, synthetic or non. And it tasted pretty much like monster. Energy drinks are fairly new to the beverage scene, within–I’d say the last 15 years or so. (I realize coffee’s been around much longer. It doesn’t count.) Coca-Cola had cocaine in it, too (hence the name), so perhaps at some point Taurine could be removed from energy drinks. On the other hand, it could be like MSG–in that, while people say it has certain effects on you, it’s not been proven, and it sure makes it delicious.