Energy Drink Alternative

A capsule gives you the caffeine from an energy drink without the sugar, the sweeteners, the carbonation, the flavourings, or the 250ml of liquid you have to drink to get it. A typical 250ml energy drink carries around 80mg of caffeine and around 27g of sugar. Two Aurora Flow capsules carry 180mg of caffeine and no sugar at all.

Whether that trade is worth making depends on what you actually wanted from the can. Most people, it turns out, wanted the caffeine.

What is actually in an energy drink

Strip the branding away and a standard energy drink is four things: water, caffeine, sugar, and flavouring. Everything else, the taurine, the B-vitamins, the inositol, the glucuronolactone, is present in quantities that make a better ingredient list than they do a difference.

The sugar is the part worth pausing on. A 250ml can at around 27g of sugar is roughly seven sugar cubes. The World Health Organization suggests keeping free sugars under about 25g a day for an adult, and one can gets you past that before lunch.

The sugar-free versions solve this by swapping sugar for sweeteners, usually aspartame and acesulfame K. Those are approved and considered safe at normal intakes. They are also, for a lot of people, the reason sugar-free energy drinks taste the way they do.

The volume problem nobody mentions

Here's the practical thing. To get 180mg of caffeine from a standard energy drink, you have to drink somewhere around 500 to 600ml. That's two cans. Half a litre of cold, carbonated, sweetened liquid, ideally before it goes flat, ideally not right before a meeting.

Two capsules and a glass of water take four seconds.

This is a boring advantage and it's the one that actually changes behaviour. Nobody switches to capsules because they read a study. They switch because they got tired of carrying cans.

Side by side

Energy drink figures are typical values for a standard 250ml can and vary between products. Check the label of whatever you're actually drinking, which is rather the point of this whole page.

Where a capsule is the wrong choice

We may as well be straight about this, because it's obvious to anyone who has held both.

A capsule is not a drink. If what you want from an energy drink is a cold thing to sip through a long afternoon, a capsule will not give you that, and no amount of copywriting will change it. If you're training and you want fluid and carbohydrate as well as caffeine, a capsule is only doing a third of the job.

The capsule wins on caffeine, sugar, volume and precision. It loses on being a beverage. That's the honest shape of the trade.

What we are not allowed to tell you

Every energy product on the market wants to tell you it lifts your focus, sharpens your mind, or unlocks your best work. Here is why we don't.

In the EU, a food supplement may only make a health claim if that exact claim has been authorised under Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006.

• Caffeine. Claims about alertness and attention were assessed and not authorised. Nobody selling into the EU may make them. Including us.
• Taurine. No authorised claims.
• Guarana. A botanical, sitting in an unresolved backlog. Claims were never authorised.
• Vitamin C. Authorised. It contributes to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue, and to normal energy-yielding metabolism.

So the comparison above is made of doses, volumes and grams of sugar. Not promises. If you want to know whether 180mg of caffeine does something for you, you already know, because you have drunk coffee.

Aurora Flow Energy Complex, in full

Questions people actually ask

What's a healthy alternative to energy drinks?

It depends what you're trying to remove. If it's the sugar, a sugar-free version or a capsule both solve it. If it's the sweeteners as well, a capsule does and the sugar-free can doesn't. If it's the caffeine itself you want to cut, then no energy product is the answer, and the honest advice is sleep.

Is this a Red Bull alternative?

If what you want is the caffeine without the can, then in practical terms yes. A standard 250ml energy drink gives you around 80mg of caffeine and around 27g of sugar. Two Aurora Flow capsules give you 180mg of caffeine, no sugar and no sweeteners. Whether that's an improvement depends entirely on whether you wanted a drink or wanted the caffeine.

How many energy drinks does one dose equal?

On caffeine alone, roughly two standard 250ml cans. On everything else, it's not a like-for-like swap, because a capsule contains no sugar, no liquid and no flavouring.

Are capsules healthier than energy drinks?

We're not going to use the word healthier, because it's a claim we can't make and can't define. What we can tell you is factual: no sugar, no sweeteners, no calories, four ingredients instead of ten or more, and the caffeine content printed as a number. Draw your own conclusion from that.

Is a capsule an alternative to coffee too?

For the caffeine, yes, and with better dose precision, because a cup of coffee can range from 60mg to 180mg depending on how it was made. For the ritual, the warmth and the taste, obviously not. Plenty of people keep the morning coffee and use a capsule for the part of the day where they actually want to know the number.

Will I crash?

Caffeine from any source clears your system eventually, and the tiredness it was masking is still waiting when it does. With an energy drink you also get a sugar load on top, which has its own arc. Removing the sugar removes half of what people mean by the word crash. It doesn't remove caffeine's own decline. More on that here.

Related reading

• Energy supplements, explained: how to read any label
• Caffeine capsules: dose ranges and the EFSA reference intakes
• Pre-workout, energy drink or capsule: what the differences actually are
• Clean energy without the crash: what the phrase actually means
• The caffeine crash: what it is, and what it isn't
• Aurora Flow Energy Complex: 60 capsules, four ingredients, every dose disclosed