Under current rules, any drink, other than tea or coffee, with over 150mg of caffeine per litre requires a warning label saying: “High caffeine content. Not recommended for children or pregnant or breast-feeding women.”
But some drinks contain almost three times this amount.
And Prof Amelia Lake from Teesside University, who has studied the drinks’ impact on young people’s lives, said they had “no place” in the diets of children.
“We know these drinks are part of youth culture and associated with sports, gaming, music and more, but there is a lack of clear signalling about their health consequences.”
The major supermarkets have imposed their own voluntary ban on selling high caffeine drinks to the under sixteens but this isn’t the case in many smaller stores.
Gavin Partington from the British Soft Drinks Association said his members already have a vountary code for their members not to “promote the sale of energy drinks to under 16s and label all high-caffeine beverages as ‘not recommended for children’.”
For the next 12 weeks evidence will be gathered from health and education experts as well as the public, shops and drink makers.