On the conclusion of her 10-year-old son’s soccer match, Jennifer Temple handed the child $5 for a drink.
He got here back with a bottle of PRIME hydration, made by the identical brand that produces PRIME energy – the drink promoted by influencer-turned-wrestler Logan Paul and YouTuber KSI that Sen. Chuck Schumer is now demanding the FDA investigate.
The energy drink has a whopping 200 mg of caffeine per 12 ounce can — an 8.4 ounce can of Red Bull has 80 mg.
Schumer said: “Buyer and fogeys beware, since it’s a serious health concern for the youngsters it so feverishly targets.”
Temple was shocked when the opposite kids made an enormous deal out of her son’s prized beverage.
“It made him seem cool,” she told The Post. “Kids were going crazy for it and saying, ‘PRIME, PRIME, PRIME…’ How do they even learn about it?”
Besides being a mom, Temple has a PhD in neuroscience and worked on studies involving children and caffeine at University of Buffalo where she is a professor.
“I wouldn’t have let him get the drink with caffeine,” Temple said. “He got the hydration one” – there’s a PRIME energy drink, which debuted in January 2023, and a PRIME hydration drink, which got here a yr earlier – “but I’m not blissful that there’s a version with 200 mg of caffeine, geared toward children.”
A preview for an upcoming industrial for PRIME Energy has the hallmarks of a viral TikTok video: messy stuff being thrown on the industrial’s drink-chugging star and urgent narration.
In studying greater than 100 children, Temple continued, “We found that there’s a strong desire to proceed drinking the caffeinated beverage and, if consumed later within the day, it could impact a toddler’s ability to go to sleep. If a child, with a small body, has just a few cans, it will probably make him jittery or cause him to throw up.”
Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, primary care pediatrician at Columbia University Irvin Medical Center in Manhattan, shares the priority.
“The primary concern is how appealing it’s to children,” Bracho-Sanchez told The Post, referring to the brightly-colored cans with flavors including blue raspberry, strawberry watermelon and tropical punch.
“If it was clearly for adults and had a crazy amount of caffeine, we could be having a distinct conversation.”
PRIME told The Post in a press release that its energy drink shouldn’t be made for kids and its packaging makes clear it shouldn’t be for under-18s.
“As a brand, our top priority is consumer safety, so we welcome discussions with the FDA or some other organization regarding suggested industry changes they feel are obligatory to be able to protect our consumers,” it added.
Paul has boasted about soaring sales of PRIME, which is made by Congo, an energy drinks star-up in Louisville, Ky. He and KSI are listed as founders.
The duo have have energetically promoted the drinks world wide, signing a deal to make PRIME hydration the official sports drink of UFC, and doing the identical with major-name sports teams including the LA Dodgers, and soccer teams Arsenal, of London, England, and Barcelona, of Spain.
Paul told boxing podcast True Geordie that his “number” for selling his share could be $5 billion, while he told an Australian radio interviewer that sales in January alone had been $45 million.
The concern for Bracho-Sanchez is what happens if kids drink multiple cans of Prime energy drink. “When there’s something cool, with different flavors, kids wish to try different flavors. It is feasible that they don’t eat only one can and that’s once we get into dangerous territory.
“After we get to higher amounts of caffeine, I worry about kids experiencing heart palpitations and abnormal heart rhythms.
“It’s rare, but when you may have an underlying condition, like heart arrhythmia, which you could not know you may have, and also you test your body, we will have dangerous medical consequences.
“You possibly can go into an abnormal heart rhythm that requires emergency medical care. If it happens to 1 kid, that’s one kid too many.”
It has happened within the UK, where a college in Newport, Wales, told parents that a toddler had suffered a cardiac episode after drinking a can of PRIME, WalesOnline reported.
The varsity texted parents to inform them: “The kid needed to have their stomach pumped and although higher now the parent wanted us to share this as a reminder of the potential harmful effects.”
And the drink shouldn’t be even easy to get within the UK. Supply problems there, in response to Insider, have resulted in a black market amongst students desiring the PRIME drinks that they’ll’t get their hands on.
They were selling PRIME for as much as $12 per bottle — or extorting other kids for the drinks.
A bodega owner in Brooklyn told The Post that it shouldn’t be unusual to see parents from European nations loading up on the drink to bring home for his or her kids. “They spend $50, $60, $80,” said the owner who didn’t reveal his name for privacy reasons. “For now, it’s an enormous deal amongst the youngsters.”
Too bad for many who live in Denmark, where sales of the energy drink are “not legal.” In Recent Zealand, it shouldn’t be sold attributable to the surplus of caffeine.
As to what happens with PRIME energy drink within the US, Bracho-Sanchez said, “I hope the FDA puts restrictions on how this drink is advertised and marketed, [with] meaningful conversations in regards to the potential dangers.”
