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Death by Coffee?
Clif Griffin writes "Slashdots question of the year, are you ready for this? No? Too bad, you'll hear me anyways. Will drinking 100 cups of coffee (the good kind, not that crappy decaf mocalatte crap) in 24 hours kill a person? Sure, there is one way we can find out but we can't let myself die under mysterious circumstances."
About ten grams of caffeine in a short period of time will kill you. There is about 100mg in your average cup of coffee (though it can vary wildly). So the math is right, but you'd have to suck down all one-hundred in a short period of time to get a fatal amount of it. Too much liquid, I think, you just can't process it that fast. All that would happen is you'd probably be urinating like a racehorse (caffeine is a diuretic), and and have a really bad headache to show for it at the end of the day.
;)
Over the course of 24 hours, a lot of the effect would probably be mitigated by the time span. I don't know how long it would take you to get the caffeine out of your system, maybe someone else does. Google says around 13% of the caffeine in your body is removed every hour, but I haven't a clue how correct it is. Sounds dubious.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
..in the alt.suicide.holiday Methods FAQ and have fun.
Back in my younger, experimentalist phase, I tried taking a lot of caffeine pills. I had 13, which is about 20 or 30 cups of coffee. It was an overdose.
For about an hour I had a huge, ever-increasing buzz. Then it became difficult to walk. Then I started to throw up. I was vomiting for about 10 hours straight.
Unless you want to go through the same hell that I did, lay off the massive coffee dose.
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
The LD50 for caffeine is estimated at 150 mg/kg body weight
or approximately 10 grams for the averaged size human. There is about 125 mg in 1 cup of coffee, which is about 12.5g/100 cups. So yes, there is little over a 50% chance it could kill you.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
A cup of coffee has about 150 mg of caffeine in it.
Hence, 100 cups of coffee is about 10-15 grams of pure caffeine.
The lethal dose varies.. different people react diffferently. That's why there are LD50's.. which is the value which statistically kills half the subjects. (or, you could view that as a 50%/50% chance)
The LD50 for caffeine in rats (orally) is 192 mg/(kg body mass)..
A typical male human weighs about 80 kg.. 15 grams of caffeine divided by that is 187 mg/kg.
So, yes that amount of caffine can definitely kill someone. I wouldn't take my chances.
To elaborate slightly on the parent poster, the condition is called Hyponatremia. Essentially, it's the opposite of dehydration. Too much water decreases electrolyte concentration. So the important factor is, does coffee contain electrolytes? I suspect the answer is no.
At 100 cups, Fry finds some inner mind power new age shit, and ends up saving everyone from a fire because time basically slows for him and he can bring everyone out of the burning building. Overall a pretty good episode.
"The truth suffers from too much analysis"
Coffee contains electrolytes, and far too much. By drinking coffee you actually dehydrate your body, because the coffee has a higher electrolyte concentration than your body. This is one of the reasons behind the tradition to be served with a glass of water together with an espresso in an italian restaurant.
A Google for water torture "Conan Doyle" gives The Leather Funnel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as fourth result, which must be the story you read..
A Google for water torture inquisition will then give you more details than you probably wanted (once you get past the pr0n).
Now, what was I doing...?
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
That means the lowest lethal dose reported in the literature was 192 mg of caffine per 1 kilogram of weight of the victim. I'll let someone else look up plausible values of caffine content in coffee.
It is certainly possible to kill yourself with caffine, you just need enough of it.
I found a link for content of the beans, the values are around 1.3 %. So 100 grams of beans contains 1.3 grams of caffine, or 1300 mg.
Eating 100 g of beans is well over the limit, assuming any of my math is right :)
No, coffee isn't dehydrating because it contains too many electrolytes. It's dehydrating because caffeine is a diuretic, i.e. a drug that induces urination. In any case, though, the comment about serving with a glass of water points out something important- that you can theoretically overcome issues with overhydration/dehydration/mineral depletion/etc. by drinking something else or taking electrolytes at over the same time period that you're taking the coffee, negating its negative effects (other than the potential caffeine toxicity).
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
In the case of coffee, you don't really have to drink anything else. The diuretic effect of coffee only eliminates about half the water. In other words a cup of coffee is about equivalent to half a cup of water.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Check out this debunking page.
An excerpt (for the lazy):"Lawrence E. Armstrong, a professor of exercise and environmental physiology at the University of Connecticut, found that caffeine is not the dehydrating demon some people believe. In fact, he concluded that caffeine is no more a diuretic than water."
Actually, hyponatremia can be a direct result of ecstasy use.
One of the effects of ecstasy is that the user may lose the ability to monitor and control water levels in the body--so simply put, they do not know how much water they have or need. As a result, the two most prevalent causes of death as a result of ecstasy usage are heatstroke (severe overheating, and not enough water) and drinking too much (hyponatremia).
it's been mentioned, but i'll elaborate.
yes, caffeine is a diuretic. meaning that it directly affects your kidneys in a manner that increases their urine production. in addition, though, caffeine is a vasoconstrictor. so it causes the overall volume of your cardiovascular system to decrease, which increases blood pressure, which increases urine production. in addition, that vasoconstriction also affects the smooth muscle lining your bladder, causing its tone to increase. thus, its volume capacity to hold urine decreases, meaning that you feel the urge to urinate sooner (at a smaller volume of urine).
so caffeine's effects are more systemic than its mild duiretic effect. the electrolytes in the coffee only amplify the urine production even more.
now if you'll excuse me, i'm on my 3rd cup this morning and i really gotta tako a piss.
NO, 100 cups of coffee according to the show Futurama (episode: three hundred big boys) will actually set you in a super hightened and mobile state where you move at super human speed and awareness. Thus you can save people.
:(
"I think we were just saved by an orange Blur!!!"
I wish they would bring that show back.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
As far as I know (I am not a physician [yet]), higher blood pressure is caused by contracting of the arteries or by a high level of electrolytes or by an increase of the heart frequency. Nicotine for instance causes a higher heart frequency by having the coronar (heart) arteries contracting, thus signalling a lower level of nutrition to the heart muscle, which in turn increases its frequency to compensate.
Caffeine is a stimulant to the nervous system and increases the blood pressure by causing the injection of adrenaline, which in turn increases breath and heart frequency, thus bettering the nutrition of the body and making you feel awake and alert.
But caffeine is not the single ingredient of coffee. Coffee contains about 700-2500 different ingredients (The different sources give different numbers). Many of them are created during the roasting process, and the way the coffee beans are roasted thus strongly influences the later taste of the coffee. Many of those ingredients are solulable in water, thus increasing the electrolyte side of the balance.
The LD50 (leathal dose, 50% occurance) of caffeine administered oraly in humans is 192 mg/kg. Meaning that a 70kg (150lbs) person who ingests 13.44g of pure caffeine has a 50% chance of survival. Since the standard cup of drip coffee has 150 mg of caffeine (a shot of espresso has substantially LESS) a 70kg individual would have to ingest 89.6 cups in once sitting to reach the 50% survival dose.
89.6 cups is a lot of volume so it is unlikely that one could drink that much at once. The question posed was whether 100 cups in 24 hours would be fatal. Since the metabolic half life of caffeine is 4 hours, this problem becomes a little more complicated. Assuming the 100 cups were spaced evenly throughout the 24 hour period (one each 14.4 minutes), we can calculate the total caffeine in the bloodstream at any time durring the 24 hour period.
At one cup every 15 minutes, the level of caffeine reaches an equilibrium with the rate of degredation arround cup #70 with a blood level of 2.4g -- much less than the LD50 of 13.4g. Even if you were drinking a cup every 5 minutes, the blood level would stabalize around 7.2g -- in the danger zone but still likely survivable especially with medical attention.
Caffeine is a dierettic (makes you pee) and so your biggest risk would likely be dehydration. But that's another story entierly.
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Just in case:
Drugs affect different people in different ways. Don't try doing your own experiments.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.