We sell an energy drink, so start there. The earlier version of this page was titled "The Healthiest Energy Drink for Gamers, Hands Down!" and was about ours. This version is about caffeine, which is what you are actually buying.
The part that is real
Caffeine is one of the better-studied performance compounds there is, and the effects relevant to gaming are genuine but specific.
At a moderate dose it reliably improves reaction time, sustained attention during long dull stretches, and subjective alertness, particularly when you are underslept. Those are exactly the things a long session degrades, which is why the association between gaming and caffeine is not simply marketing.
What it does not do is improve decision-making, aim, or anything that looks like skill. And the dose-response curve turns over: past a moderate amount you get jitter and a higher heart rate, both of which make fine motor control worse, not better.
More is not better and past a point it is actively worse. That is the single most useful sentence on this page.
What is in ours, including the bit we used to criticise
The earlier version of this article said competing drinks are "full of synthetic overdose of vitamin B12 and other things like Taurine and Ginseng, which do more harm than good".
BluFrog contains taurine. It is in the energy blend, alongside acetyl-L-carnitine, L-theanine, quercetin, choline chloride and green coffee bean extract. It also contains eight B vitamins. Criticising the category for two things our own product contains was not a fair way to write, and we are correcting it rather than quietly deleting it.
It contains 160 mg of caffeine a can. Also not previously stated on a page arguing that other drinks have too much. For scale that is roughly a 12 oz Monster and about double a standard Red Bull.
Of the rest, L-theanine is the one with the most interesting evidence: it is the compound in green tea that appears to take the edge off caffeine's jitter while leaving the alertness, and the caffeine-plus-theanine combination has been studied more than most things in this category. Whether the amount in a can is enough to matter is a separate question and the label does not break the blend down.
The limits, which are the manufacturer's own
- No more than two cans a day.
- Not for anyone pregnant.
- Not for children under 12.
- Not for adults sensitive to caffeine.
Two cans is 320 mg, and the commonly cited healthy-adult ceiling is around 400 mg a day from everything combined. If you are also drinking coffee, you are there.
The case that should worry you more than the ingredients
In 2021 a 21-year-old was hospitalised after drinking around four energy drinks a day for two years. That was widely reported and it is worth reading.
The problem in cases like that is almost never an exotic ingredient. It is volume and duration: a very large caffeine intake, sustained, usually alongside bad sleep. Any energy drink can be used that way, ours included, and a nicer ingredient list does not change the arithmetic.
Honest alternatives
Since we would rather you were well than sold to:
- Coffee or tea. Cheaper, same active compound, easier to titrate. - Sleep. Dull and true. Nothing here beats being rested, and caffeine taken late is one of the main reasons people are not. - Water. A meaningful share of afternoon flatness is mild dehydration, which is unglamorous and free to fix. - BluFrog, if you want the caffeine without the sugar. It is sweetened with stevia and has no artificial colours, which is a real advantage over most of the category and is the honest version of the claim this page used to make.
What we are not going to tell you
That it is the healthiest energy drink, hands down. We do not have the comparison data to say that, and neither does anybody else making the same claim about theirs.
There is a video review of the same product here, and the caffeine question for older readers is here.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
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