Not What I Meant When I Said I Needed To Stay Up

On Friday, I had gone a week without a full night's sleep. It started with New Year's Eve, and just kind of carried on. I'd stay up a little late to hang out with my lovely wife, then I'd get up a little early to deal with snow covered sidewalks or whatever. After a week, I was dragging pretty badly.

Anyway, to get me through the day I picked up a Diet Pepsi Max, which is a Diet Pepsi (my soda pop of choice) with added pep. I drank it. I felt better. I made it through another afternoon without nodding off at my desk. All good, right?

Well, I look at the bottle, and it says "GINSENG + CAFFEINE" (it's all in caps presumably because that's more extreme), and I start to wonder why they put ginseng in it. I'm not an herbalist (not anymore anyway - heh), so I do what I always do and seek out information on Wikipedia. It turns out ginseng causes insomnia, which, when looked at from a "glass half full" standpoint, can be reworded to say "helps you stay awake". Not typically in the quantities they put into energy drinks, but whatever.

In gathering this information, however, I discover that ginseng is also used as an aphrodisiac and as a treatment for sexual dysfunction in men, and I'm thinking to myself that maybe at this point they should be putting a warning on the bottle. I mean, I just wanted to not fall asleep at my desk, but I would still like to reserve the right to stand should I need to without fear of awkwardness with my coworkers. Fortunately, again they don't put much in this stuff, but I can drink a lot of diet soda pop, so believe me when I tell you I'll be aware of it from now on.

The one thing that really cracked me up in all this though was the discussion of the study where they discovered that effect they say that in laboratory animals "both Asian and American forms of ginseng enhance libido and copulatory performance". All I can think of is these scientists feeding a bunch of this stuff to lab rats, and then showing them pictures of other lab rats and asking if they think the other rat is hot. I don't even want to consider how they determine the answer, or for that matter how they gauge "copulatory performance".

Do they even make cigarettes for rats?