Is Celsius Bad For You?
Fran Kilinski
Experienced Personal Trainer, Published Writer, Runner and Athlete | Founder and Advisor
Celsius is just like Bang, Red Bull, and Monster
before it. It’s an energy drink that gets you through the day, jam-packed with caffeine, and it’s in just about every store or market you walk into these days.
I will just say it — I don’t trust the product.
I researched it over the weekend because, as a former consumer of it, I always wondered, “Is this drink too good to be true? How Is there no added sugar?”
Something felt off.
Despite trying to find dirt and using all of my journalistic prowess to dig up something about the drink that I could use to bolster a case against it, I couldn’t find anything particularly bad about the drink.
Whatever the company has put together in this concoction isn’t inherently terrible for you.
It’s just the way that people consume it that has its dangers (like any other energy/caffeine-based beverage).
It led me to ask the question..
?? Is Celsius Bad For You?
When I Google searched this ^ term, a bunch of different results came up. Those who wrote articles on this topic did their click-bait well, and I clicked on every one of them.
Celsius by itself is probably better than most energy drinks that have come before it.
It’s a zero-sugar caffeine drink that has a variety of distinct flavors, which always raises eyebrows.
“How can something with no sugar taste that good?”
The answer is artificial sweeteners, the likes of which get dragged into today’s nutrition discussion.
While the term “artificial” has become heinously demonized among health influencers, it should be known that consuming them in moderation won’t have any drawbacks for your health.
The recent sh*tstorm over Aspartame ended with Layne Norton, a trusted nutrition myth debunker putting to rest the idea that it can kill us — we’d have to consume gallons of aspartame per day to get cancer from it.
That being said…
The primary sweetener in Celsius is sucralose, and the brand uses citric acid, a preservative, for “flavoring,” they clarified, after a lawsuit was filed that said the company was not being truthful in calling their drinks “preservative free” (they settled on the lawsuit).
That suit and Celsius’ further marketing of the drink as a “performance booster” have me wondering about whether or not the ingredients, although benign after drinking a single can, are worth it for daily drinkers or even multi-can-per-day people.
A Reddit user asked “I drink a Celsius everyday. Is this bad?” about a year ago in r/energydrinks, and the replies to his thread on the forum had me wondering the same thing.
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“Bro, I have ADHD, and even just 3 sips of Celsius made my heart go shwooom! Although I guess that could be due to the fact I hate coffee and most tea and so I never drink caffeine normally at all,” one user replied.
“I once tried to drink 2 in a day, and only got halfway through the 2nd can before I felt like I was on meth and couldn't sit still,” said another.
A few others commented on the taste and caffeine addiction, which made me think that consuming more than one Celsius in a day (which would put you at the caffeine limit of 400mg, and well beyond the Vitamin B6 and B12 daily recommended amounts, greening your urine) probably isn’t great…
And probably isn’t uncommon among younger people.
You can decide if that observation makes the drink “healthy” or not.
Here's what TikTokers have to say
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TikTok is far from the most reliable source of information for anything, let alone health information.
Still, it’s worth giving people the benefit of the doubt if they’re going so far as to cry into a camera about their negative experience with something.
That takes a lot of vulnerability, and in the case of Celsius mishaps, a few cases of overconsumption are enough to raise some red flags about the drink’s role in caffeine addiction,
Like over consuming coffee or Red Bulls or Monsters, too much caffeine can be bad for your heart.
And as I mentioned earlier, a drink that tastes as good as Celsius does with as much caffeine as it has could still be dangerous, regardless of how much sugar it has.
I’m not sure one Celsius drink a day is the best option for someone who needs an energy boost.
I’m not particularly biased toward coffee, either, but I’d bet 1 cup of straight black coffee would get the job done more effectively without potential drawbacks.
TikTok users have likely removed a lot of videos in the advent of realizing Celsius itself wasn’t poison, but the over-consumption of it was.
Whatever your opinions on the drink, I think it is a bit risky to have daily, or even multiple times a week.
As with all questionable supplements, it's probably best left to moderation.