Oh, I thought it was caffeine addiction.

So I was looking up the amount of caffeine in a sugarfree Redbull. I thought my happy emotions after drinking Redbull were due to caffeine addiction. I've been feeling pissy before I drink caffeine, and afterwards I'm always in a better mood; I thought this was simply because my body got what it was craving.

Along the way, I also wanted to find out how much taurine is in Redbull & what exactly this molecule does. I mean, it's the third ingredient on the nutrition label (after things like water & citric acid, for god's sake)! I gotta know what this thing's doing to my body. So I come across the Redbull website, which says, (among other interesting things), that Redbull "improves emotional status." That makes sense because plain coffee/caffeine doesn't give me the same emotional high that Redbull does.

So one of the main reasons Redbull improves your mood (besides satisfying caffeine addiction) is due to taurine. Taurine is this weird molecule.. it's an amino acid that has a million different little functions in your body. One of them is it can act as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in your brain. It's not actually a neurotransmitter (you know what neurotransmitters are- they're things like serotonin & dopamine), but it can act like one because its structure is similar enough to GABA, (an inhibitory neurotransmitter in your brain) that it can sortof copy what GABA does (I'm trying to explain without getting too technical for you people who aren't in my Mammalian Physiology class). Taurine also makes GABA more effective by preventing it from breaking down -->which multiplies its inhibitory effects. An "inhibitory" effect means that an "excitatory" message has trouble going through the area that has been inhibited.

GABA's inhibitory effects are related to mood stability. In diseases like Bipolar Disorder, the GABA pathway doesn't work correctly, which means it can't balance out opposite (excitatory) messages in the brain like it would normally; so moods can easily fluctuate between extremes, as random excitatory messages rampage through your brain, undampered.

It's interesting to relate this to how alcohol works, since we're more familiar with that than neurotransmitters. As we all know, alcohol depresses the central nervous system. Thus, it acts as a depressant; and like many depressant drugs, it activates this same GABA pathway. This means that alcohol keeps neurons in your brain from relaying excitatory messages, which initially results in relaxation, feeling tipsy/high/"fuzzy", and pain subsiding.

So now I understand why energy drinks with excessive amounts of Taurine can cause you to feel similar to that first drink or two of alcohol; they activate the same neurotransmitter in your brain!