"Due to a built in taste moderation, it is hard to hit your natural upper limit. But because energy drinks are sweet and easily drinkable, novice caffeine users

"Due to a built in taste moderation, it is hard to hit your natural upper limit. But because energy drinks are sweet and easily drinkable, novice caffeine users can hit their upper limit in a short amount of time." It's an interesting hypothesis. I'd add that coffee is (most often) served hot, and as such, consuming a cup of coffee takes quite a bit longer than chugging down a cold can of Red Bull. And about that chugging: it's a different use case. People are conditioned to treat energy drinks like stimulants. The drinks are even marketed as such. Coffee, on the other hand, is primarily consumed in moderation (aside from classic tales of all-nighters, etc., which probably represent a fraction of a percentage of coffee usage). People see coffee as a morning ritual, whereas they see energy drinks as -- for lack of a better word -- speed. The use cases are very different, as are the consumption patterns. I would hypothesize that energy drinks are inherently no more dangerous than coffee, at least as far as their ingredients go. Rather, they're more dangerous because they're consumed in greater quantities and at greater speed -- rapidly injecting the body with massive quantities of caffeine, and thus shocking the unprepared system. Coffee is more of a slow drip of caffeine, as it were.