It seems to be the perfect party drink, and teenagers are loving it: A long drink made from Vodka and an Energy Drink.
It keeps you awake, makes you feel good and gets you into the party mood.
But now, pharmacologists have actually found out that this mixture alters the brain of a growing human being in a similar way like cocaine does.
Their studies showed that the efficiency of our brain’s reward system can change if you consume this longdrink often.
If you only drink alcohol or only caffeine, the effect doesn’t happen - only the COMBINATION of the two changes the neurochemistry of your brain.
Tests with mice have shown that they got a lot more active after drinking alcohol and caffeine, and they also showed the same physical and neurochemical symptoms like someone who’s taken cocaine.
What’s interesting is that the effect of cocaine was less strong when mice took it that had previously been taking vodka-energy regularly.
Another thing they have found was that a large amount of the protein FosB.
It’s a clue to sustainable changes of brain chemistry and you can find it after people took morphine or cocaine.
FosB being released with every activity we do that triggers our reward system - whether that’s gambling, sex, drugs…)
What it does is that it makes us crave more of the stimulation, increases our tolerance for it and at the same time weakens our will to resist it.
The researchers then gave the tested mice an artificial sweetener - Saccharin. He also activates the reward system of the mice’s brains.
So if the reward system was dulled, they expected to see that those mice would consume more of the saccharin than a normal mice that had never had that alcohol-caffeine mixture before.
And the results confirmed that theory.
The mice that had taken the alcohol-caffeine mixture in their teenage years, consumed more of the sweetener.
So this confirms that the brains did get altered and the vodka-energy mixture makes changes in our brain and dulls our reward system.
So now if we transfer the results of this experiment to humans, it would mean that all the teenagers who have consumed vodka energy longdrinks regularly have now dulled their reward system and built up a tolerance, similar to a cocaine addict!
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