RATING: 8.3 OUT OF 10.
There has been a steady increase of anti-energy drinks, more formally known as Relaxation Beverages, in the past few months or so. Relaxation beverages use ingredients such as l-theanine and valerian root to keep you feeling at ease. Its objective is to relax you, not to put you to sleep. Although the drink I am reviewing now has a sleep formula which will be reviewed a couple days from now. I first came across Take 10 in a newspaper article that discussed the rise of relaxation beverages. It only touched on a few other products, but the main company they talked about was Take 10 Beverages. I e-mailed them and they were kind enough to send a rather well developed press kit to my doorstep. It contained 2 of each kind (relax and sleep), 2 thick sheets of paper describing the product, a nice looking t-shirt, and a compact disc containing biographies of the main people behind Take 10 and the ingredients used in the product and what those ingredients claim to do. These drinks come in 2 ounce shot bottles and the one I drank had a white grape flavor advertised. It's really a rather sweet drink and it doesn't taste too relaxing. It's almost like a white grape candy if I'm honest. But I'm not nit-picky, and Take 10 Relax tasted great anyway. Take 10 is powered by a wonderful 875 milligram blend of GABA, valerian root extract, rose hips extract, eleutherococcus extract, rhodiola rosea extract, l-theanine, and choline. So for the most part it has your basic relaxation inducing ingredients like GABA, valerian, and l-theanine. The rose hips have also been used before. Choline is a new one I've seen among relaxation beverages. Rhodiola is also new, but I have seen eleutherococcus in a few other products, none of them being relaxation beverages. So did all of these ingredients make me one happy camper? Well, whether it's a placebo or not, I could feel the effects. It's almost as if everything just sort of melts away a little bit. I wasn't tense anymore, and yet I still had energy to go outside and play basketball. Maybe that's a bad thing since this is more of a product to demotivate you. These retail for 3 bucks a crack and if you happen to pass by one, I say go for it. You've really got nothing to lose. 8.3 out of 10.