Over the past two decades, as U.S. soft-drink consumption has declined—full-calorie-soda sales dropped twenty-five per cent during that period, according to a recent Times report—the energy-drink market has been thriving. The beverages are consumed regularly by thirty-one per cent of kids between the ages of twelve and seventeen, and by thirty-four per cent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four. U.S. sales for energy drinks and shots now total more than twelve and a half billion dollars—a number that the market-research firm Packaged Facts predicts will grow by another nine billion dollars by 2017.
.. They found that the more a man bought into masculine ideals, the more he believed that energy drinks made him manly—and the more he drank them, the more his sleep was troubled.
.. While the connection between unrealistic standards of beauty and low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating among girls and women has been widely researched and discussed, this study is one of the few to establish a link between marketing to male insecurity and unhealthy habits.
.. The study builds, in part, on a 2013 Taiwanese paper showing that college-age men used the drinks to “regulate their personal sense of masculinity” and that they will drink more of them if they perceive their masculinity to be threatened.
.. Sugar is what Wade calls “a feminized calorie.” Women tend, in advertising, to be depicted as consumers of sweet things, like chocolate and fruity drinks, while men are more associated with red meat and savory snacks, like spicy tortilla chips. The challenge for sweet energy beverages, Wade said, “was to figure out how to man them up. So you associate them with extreme sports and extremely good performance.”
.. The result has been that family fridges now often contain multiple varieties of drinks, devised to reassure the demographical identity of each member.
.. companies can sell more products if they convince consumers to divide their purchases by gender—so that, for example, husbands and wives can’t share a shampoo.
.. When consumed over a long term, Levant’s study confirmed that, in college-age men, the drinks can cause anxiety, dehydration, insomnia, and cardiovascular vascular problems.