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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.
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.
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."
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?
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.