Just when I thought I was done covering stupid
Gen Z TikTok trends, they pulled me back in. This time the liquid isn't a pink sauce, it's not
even NyQuil. It's BORG! Not… Not that Borg. This BORG. I know, it looks a lot less cool,
right? That's saying a lot because, you know, we're talking about Star Trek. Cool and Star
Trek, never really synonymous with each other. Hello Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, where the
only thing we're imbibing in excess is knowledge. So let's just talk about the latest Gen Z craze
sweeping the campuses of U.S. universities. Excuse me. What was that? Oh, okay. Yeah.
The latest Gen Z craze that's been sweeping the campuses of U.S. universities for the last
several years. Yeah, Once again, the mainstream media is a little bit late on the uptake for
this one. What you see before you on screen is a liquor store in a jug cheekily named the BORG.
This thing has been making the headlines lately, not just because of its incredibly dangerous
premise, but also because of its looks, which are somewhere between overly hydrated Gym Bro
and The Beverly Hillbillies. If you've never seen one of these things, the BORG or Blackout Rage
Gallon is basically everything that you see here. Gallon jug, unidentifiable liquid inside,
usually a bright color that's reminiscent of a culty Kool-Aid and a gaggle of college
tailgaters sloshing them around at hip height, slinging back a few gulps, and then recapping.
It is hard to describe just how unappealing these things look from the outside. But
the Blackout Rage Gallon seems to be the apparent edgelord of the drinking game world.
And it's recently made the rounds on TikTok with lots of confused and angry commentary. Gen
Z’s rendition of Freshman Fun here has garnered over 85 million views across the platform. And
honestly, it's not hard to understand why once you learn that the recipe for one of these
things involves a practically lethal dose of alcohol thrown into a random unlabeled jug.
Safety, Thy name is not BORG. So what exactly is in this thing? While each individual BORG may
be lovingly handcrafted to meet the drinker's needs. Your typical BORG contains roughly a half
gallon or 1.9 liters of water. So off the bat, you better be hoping that you're planning
a party near the restroom. Even the most elastic bladder is going to be needing
it after a couple swigs of this puppy. And if you're an absolute mad lad when it comes
to hydration, some people are even throwing in electrolyte packets like Liquid I.V. likely there
to try and offset what comes next in the recipe: A whopping fifth of alcohol, 750 milliliters.
For reference, that is an entire bottle of Skyy Vodka. That is 17 servings of
alcohol right in your actual fingertips. Next, you're going to want to make sure
that you'll taste absolutely none of that alcohol by drowning it in flavor enhancers. The
standard choices seem to be Mio Black Cherry or Kool-Aid tropical punch, because I love my
alcohol to remind me of elementary school snack time. And there it is. Boom done. Your
BORG is complete; it all adds up to a gallon of fun and a whole lot of hospital visits.
In case you couldn’t tell I’m approaching this quote unquote “beverage” with some
sober skepticism, since at the outset, this seems to be nothing if not a
completely terrible idea. But what if… what if it's not? What if there's an
appeal here that we're overlooking? I mean, taking a glance at this thing, the redeeming
qualities would have to be really deeply buried. But what if, instead of trashing on something new,
we try to find some of its merit instead? Come on, hold your nose. Let's take a swig of this
BORG-tastic trend so at the end of the episode, you can honestly review. To tell me in the
comments whether you think this idea is sickeningly smart or still just sickening. Down
the hatch my fellow theorists. Now the BORG is purely a product of college day drinking culture,
the thing is basically a bucket of cheap alcohol. This is not about trying to craft the most elegant
tiki drink for your Tridelt lulau, this is about getting trashed for pennies on the dollar. But
just how bad is the BORG? Like I mentioned before, the traditional Borg recipe contains 17 servings
of alcohol. Probably don't need to count on your fingers to guess that that one is probably a bit
more than you should be having. The definition of binge drinking is four drinks or more for a female
and five drinks or more for a male within a two hour period. Something that is uncomfortably easy
to achieve for the BORG toting masses out there, but that's just if we stop at mere binge drinking.
What the BORG actually qualifies for is the other category that you don't usually hear about:
high intensity drinking. True to its name, this kind of drinking, as defined by the National
Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, is an alcohol intake twice or more the gender
specific threshold for binge drinking. So about eight drinks for a female and ten for a male,
which again puts us just over the 50% mark for a single BORG. Now I hear you. A gallon of anything
is a lot. Alcohol or otherwise. That's where the flavorings come in, which introduces a whole
other set of problems into this recipe. You see, the traditional version of the BORG involves a
full bottle of Mio black cherry flavoring, but you're not just dropping it. A bunch of artificial
colors and sweeteners there, what you're also adding in there is caffeine ,and a lot of it.
The Mio black cherry contains an eye watering 1080 milligrams of caffeine. I kind of feel like
I've had it out for caffeine in recent episodes, especially for a guy who drinks a fair share
of caffeine myself. But even by my standards, that is an over the top amount of caffeine
and it is well into the realm of dangerous. As we discussed in the Panera Lemonade
episode, the FDA's recommended maximum amount of caffeine is 400 milligrams per day.
That is the absolute upper limit. Beyond that, you're running into serious risk of seizures,
heart problems and all kinds of other side effects. But here's the BORG taking that amount
of caffeine and doubling it. So high intensity drinking mixed with caffeine overdose sounds
like a pretty bad combination, right? Well, the sum of its parts are actually much worse than
you might initially think. In 2005, a group of recent Ohio State graduates got together to create
Phusion Products, a company designed to create and distribute a prototype of their new drink: Energy
Beer. Basically, while they were in college, they'd started mixing energy drinks with various
alcoholic beverages and they got a lot of positive feedback. Seeing that they could make money off of
it they created the drink now known as Four Loko, a flavored beer that was infused with caffeine.
By 2008, this drink was ready for the mainstream U.S. market, and within a year it had exploded in
popularity and was going international. And then: In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration
and Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to all producers of caffeinated alcoholic
beverages. Why? Well they were seeing increased reports of teens getting hospitalized with blood
alcohol contents equal to twice the legal limit. We’re all familiar with caffeine in drinks
right? And we've talked on this channel before about the fact that caffeine is a substance
the FDA considers to be GRAS or Generally Recognized As Safe. What you probably didn't know,
though, is that caffeine's GRASS certification only applies to its use in cola beverages.
Start sticking it in alcohol and suddenly you're looking at something the FDA no longer considers
to be safe and for very good reason. You see, caffeine is a neuro stimulant, meaning it has the
ability to stimulate the central nervous system and dilate your arteries, increasing blood flow
to your brain, and thereby making you feel more alert. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a little bit
more complicated. One of the reasons alcohol seems to have different effects on different people
is because it can act as both a stimulant and as a neuro depressant. When you first ingest
alcohol, it releases dopamine into your brain, causing a temporary elation or happy feeling.
Usually the stage where people feel loud and happy and raucous while they're drinking. But then
after a while, the second effect of alcohol kicks in, which is a lot more of a downer.
Alcohol affects the neural transmitter in your brain called GABA. GABA is key to regulating your
nervous system. It actually regulates a lot of your core motor abilities, like balance, reasoning
and making you feel calmer and more even keeled. Alcohol disrupts the production of GABA, which is
why you feel so many sensory effects of alcohol from loss of coordination to slurred speech to
sleepiness. So what happens when you mix an upper like caffeine with a downer like alcohol? You
might initially think that they're just going to cancel each other out, right? But that's not
exactly what's going to happen. Because caffeine dilates your blood vessels, making them bigger, it
means that they're able to carry more blood. This literally opens up the pathway for more alcohol
to get to your brain than would otherwise happen. Wider blood vessels also means more room for
alcohol in the blood. That's why patients hospitalized after drinking things like Four Loko
had unexpectedly high blood alcohol contents. On top of all of that, caffeine can temporarily keep
you awake and alert long enough to believe that you're not getting as drunk as you actually are,
fooling your body and your better judgment into drinking way past your normal limits.
You're not feeling the alcohol yet, so you're probably safe to keep going. Fast
forward to today where drinks like Four Loko have removed all their caffeine content for all of
the reasons we just discussed. But then you have the BORG. The BORG is basically the same story all
over again, turning you into a drunken Energizer bunny before turning you into an E.R. case.
And if you think all of this is too sciencey and theoretical, you don't have to take
my word for it. We've seen this playing out in the real world lately. Earlier this
month, 46 students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst were hospitalized due
to BORG consumption. It took a total of 28 different ambulances to handle all of the cases.
So at this point, we've pretty much trashed the idea of this drink, right? There's no coming
back from this. But what if I told you that in spite of all the terrible things that we've
leveled at the BORG so far in this episode, the underlying principle behind why it exists
in the first place are actually impressive, commendable even. Don't get it twisted I'm not
saying that this thing is something you should be consuming. It is dangerous on so many levels. It's
obviously a bad idea to drink 17 shots of vodka mixed with caffeine. But you know what's a good
idea? Not drinking even one shot of someone else's vodka. There are some things out there on college
campuses that are just as scary, if not more scary than drinking in excess. I'm talking about spiked
drinks, the rate of drugged or tampered alcohol in college campuses is staggering. Drugs designed
to incapacitate victims are extremely prevalent in colleges, with over 300,000 cases reported
every year. And mind you, those are only the cases that are getting reported. In one study done
by a University of South Carolina research team, they found that 7.8% of their sample reported
incidents in which they'd been drugged. 1.4% said they'd either drugged someone themselves
or they knew someone who had drugged someone else. In yet another study from 2016, 44% of men and
56% of women reported accidentally ingesting something spiked without knowing it, mostly
during their college years. For women, that is over half! One in every two people that you
see walking around the average college, and over 11% of people reported having been the victim of
some type of assault or inappropriate incident in college related to consuming spiked food or drink.
So now that you know the stats, can you think of one thing you might be able to do to make sure
your drink is never spiked at a party? Maybe you carry your own. Maybe you make sure it's in
a sealed container with a cap that only you open and close. Maybe you make sure you make it
yourself because you can't trust anything made by someone else in questionable social circumstances.
Suddenly, the reasons for the BORG come clearly into focus. A BORG isn't just about fun, it's
about safety. If you're planning on getting drunk, which isn't something that I recommend. But if
you're going to do it anyway, you need to know that even when your judgment isn't great,
you don't need to worry about there being extra stuff in your drink that you didn't plan on
ingesting. Another brilliant BORG moment, allowing people to adjust their personal level of alcohol
consumption without anyone knowing. You ever go to a party where you felt pressured to drink more
than you were comfortable with? Maybe someone poured a drink for you that you didn't want or
was stronger than you wanted. But because of the social setting, you felt pressured to say yes.
On college campuses where drinking culture can sometimes be high pressure, it could be associated
with hazing or expected in order to conform. A BORG allows individuals to hide how much
they're consuming or not consuming. A look back at TikTok actually shows that among the
BORG tags there's a fair number of non-alcoholic BORG options out there that people are making for
everything from curing hangovers to curing Covid. Good... Good luck with that one I guess.
The idea that the BORG can look like everyone else's drink without having to conform to
everyone else's drink is brilliant. You're able to fit in without having to put yourself
at risk. And speaking of that Covid thing, I don't think the BORG is going to be curing
it, but it's certainly slowing the spread at these parties. Long gone are the days of communal
punch bowls or mixing up your red solo cup with someone else's. With the BORG you've got your
jug and swigging from that jug is going to be keeping you safe from everyone else's germs.
So at the end of the day, while the BORG is still very dangerous, presenting the opportunity
to drink yourself way over any recognizable limit when it comes to alcohol and caffeine. Two issues
that I cannot overly express the dangers of. There is another major side to the story. The BORG
allows younger drinkers to control exactly what they're drinking and how much they're drinking.
It allows big parties to be at least slightly cleaner, and it provides the ultimate security
knowing that your drink is only your drink, you hold on to it, you seal it, you know that
it hasn't been tampered with. So you know what, Gen Z? I see it, I get it. Heck, I
mostly respect it. The BORG is the best, worst decision that you can possibly have.
Maybe if you just found yourself just a smaller bottle, guys. Maybe things would be
a little bit better. Name it the BORG baby or something. It’d be super cute, super kawaii.
It’ll probably get you a little extra clout in the process. But hey, that's just a theory. A
FOOD THEORY! Thanks for drinking responsibly.
Well, yea