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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."
Well, if drinking a hundred cups of coffee in twenty-four hours doesn't kill you, it'll certainly give you a wicked case of the runs.
Kind of like on the "Bambi" episode of The Young Ones back in the 80s, when Rick tries to kill himself by overdosing on a bottle of pills he's just found in the medicine cabinet.
"Vyv, Vyv, uh, can you, like, really kill yourself with laxative pills?" Neil asks his other housemate, Vyvyan, who replies, "I don't know, Neil, but I'm going to stay and find out."
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
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."
Spread out over 24 hours? Hmm.. that's 4.167 cups/hour.
If you were wise and countered the stimulant effect with the soothing liquid-love that is Guinness every half hour you should be in fine shape. Can't say the same about your digestive system the next day (read: "100 coffee + 48 Guinness == SplatterBum(tm)") but you'll be around to enjoy it.
disclaimer i: I'm not an MD or biologist, however I drink with the ones from work quite often.
disclaimer ii: (for your family) if he follows these directions and dies, my name is Rob Malda.
Trolling is a art,
100 glasses (~20 litres) of water would. Can't see how coffee would make it any better (or worse).
I bet 500 Euro (your car is on the way) on you dying http://rcm-medicine.upr.clu.edu/publications/sidne y_kaye/toxicology-of-caffeine.htm
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.
You might want to look at the date. (Hint: It's not March anymore.)
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
What a joy is it to see the gene pool skim itself.
It's surprising one can even survive to 10 cups of coffee, when most coffee is contaminated with DHMO.
For those who are not aware of the dangers of this substance, dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO.
Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Exposition to it gaseous form may cause burns, permanent scars and even death.
Symptoms of DHMO ingestion include sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance.
For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.
Dihydrogen monoxide is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain. It has been found that malignant cancer cells only develop in its presence.
The American government has refused to ban the production, distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its "importance to the economic health of this nation.". It's commonly used as an industrial solvent and coolant, as a fire retardant, in the distribution of pesticides, in abortion clinics,and lots more.
I created a community against DHMO in Orkut. You're all invited to join it.
You can also check the official Dihydrogen Monoxide FAQ
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Its not coffee itself that kills, but the plastic cup that reacts with the coffee, and generates an acid called tri-hidro-cafeine, that is lethal.
Here is the complete story.I thought that you were supposed to smoke that stuff, no wonder you shake monkeys!
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
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.
No.
Hey everyone! Look! I found our missing poll option!
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.
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 :)
Actually it will kill anyone. However, since the body takes several days to stop moving, it's hard to tell. I died several years ago, but a few pots of coffee a day keeps me active. (I do tend to shuffle like a zombie to the coffee maker in the morning.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Indeed.
A British girl Leah Betts died from Hyponatremia a few years ago. The official story, and the way it was hysterically presented in the press, was that she died from taking a single Ecstasy pill, whereas actually she basically drank so much water her brain swelled up and killed her.
Even sadder, most people still believe she was killed by Ecstacy...
Never let the facts get in the way of a good anti-drug hysteria whuppin' up. Remember the people on acid supposedly jumping out of windows in the '60s?
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
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."
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.