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ELON — When one of his Elon University students suggested a study of Red Bull energy drinks, Mat Gendle jumped on the idea like a wired freshman the night before finals.

Trained in neurotoxicology and neuropharmacology, the associate psychology professor looks for real-world ways to get students interested in cognitive research.

Red Bull, the popular energy drink that claims to “increase concentration and reaction speed,” is a campus staple among students trying to stay up — to study or party. Its mixture of sugar, caffeine and Taurine is seen as so potent it’s banned in several countries. “I thought it was a perfect study for college students,” Gendle said. “But there were some things we didn’t foresee.”

The first challenge: finding a way to replicate what Gendle calls “that funky energy drink taste.”

Gendle and his students needed a placebo for their study — something that looked and tasted so much like an energy drink, neither the test subjects nor those conducting the experiment would know the difference. But to test the effects properly, the placebo couldn’t be sugary or caffeinated. Like children playing in a kitchen, he and his students began mixing things together to see what they could come up with.

Finally, a student suggested a solution her father used when his New Jersey bar ran out of Red Bull: take a glass of Vernor’s ginger ale, one of the world’s oldest soft drinks, and drop in fruit-flavored Smarties candies. Fooled them every time. “That was a good place to start and we finally used sugar free raspberry syrup and sugar free ginger ale,” Gendle said.

Another problem: Most energy drink studies asked subjects not to eat the night before they came in for a morning experiment. “But that’s not the way most people use Red Bull,” Gendle said. “People use it in the afternoons, or in the evenings, for more energy and to stay awake. In the morning they’re going through overnight caffeine withdrawal and the effect would be just like their morning coffee.”

Instead, they replicated real- world conditions, seeing student-subjects in the afternoons about four hours after they’d eaten lunch. Students came in twice, once getting the ginger-ale concoction and once getting Red Bull or Sugar-Free Red Bull. A computer test gauged their attention and reaction times.

The results were surprising — and unintentionally hilarious. “I wasn’t surprised that there wasn’t a big difference,” Gendle said. “But I was surprised that there was almost no difference whatsoever.”

With all the sugar and caffeine in Red Bull, Gendle had assumed the subjects drinking it would have some advantage in reaction time. Instead, the placebo group thought they were wired and sped up, matching the others.

“Also, about thirty percent of the placebo subjects said their drink was so strong, it made them feel weird,” Gendle said. “They were drinking sugar-free ginger ale and saying, 'This is really screwing me up, man.’”

The study, which appears in the latest issue of The Open Nutrition Journal, suggests Red Bull’s caffeine kick is no more powerful than coffee.

But whether it’s coffee or Red Bull, Gendle said his interest is purely scientific.

“I’m very sensitive to caffeine myself,” he said. “I don’t even drink coffee or soda.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com