Death by Caffeine | Hacker News Reader

Death by Caffeine

energyfiend.com

39 pointssmallegan26 comments

It's surprisingly easy to overdose on caffeine, regardless of if you kill yourself though. I ended up in the hospital worried about strange heart palpitations once. It was due to too much caffeine. Apparently a litre and a half of pepsi plus a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans is a bad idea.

That being said, I bet almost everyone here has felt the effects of caffeine intoxication before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Caffeine_intoxication). It's pretty easy to hit a level which causes those kind of symptoms.

yeah, on the days leading up to any product launch

I drank a case of beer and two rockstars. 8 hour later, bam! Pericarditis.

Of course, that only takes into account the caffeine content of a beverage divided by the LD50 of caffeine as determined in rats (in mg/Kg)

I'm pretty sure something else would go horribly wrong before I finished off the 150th can of red bull, for example.

Shouldn't it then tell you - x cups of coffee and you might be dead? It is only LD50, after all.

It's best to be pessimistic in these endeavors.

Pessimistic would be LD1.

More likely, you'd be unable to consume the caffeine in a such a diluted form fast enough to exceed the rate at which the liver clears it - it takes time to empty out the stomach of all that water you're consuming along with it. Remember that humans detoxify caffeine much faster than most other mammals, too.

At a guess, you'd die from throwing your electrolyte balance off. Just like how drinking too much water can kill you. (Particularly if you drink while sweating - this routinely happens in marathons.)

More likely you'd throw yourself off a bridge, trying to make a record for the longest distance yodelled while falling.

So what this is saying is that its practically impossible to achieve an LD50 dose of caffeine without pills.

Yeah, I'd be vomiting it back up long before I got to 113 cups of coffee. I normally run about a half gallon (8 cups) a day.

Drinking even a tiny fraction of that much caffeine sounds awful. Caffeine has a terrible body load, and I'm pretty sure I'd want to die after three Red Bulls let alone 150. Coca tea is 1000x better, and they even sell it on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Coca-Tea-Novoandina-Yungas-Bags/dp/B00...

Bah anything that is legally sold in the US has the cocaine removed. What's the point?

Does it? The amount of active ingrdient in your normal coca leaf (which is all tea is) is miniscule - you need hundreds of pounds to make a gram of cocaine. You could suck back 100 bags of tea and soak them all you want and not even come close to getting "high" - you'd just be awake - coffee or regular caffeine-containing tea is more dangerous than that stuff.

"you need hundreds of pounds to make a gram of cocaine"

I think it's actually 125 grams of leaf makes one gram of cocaine. And a cup of coca tea is like 8% of a dose of cocaine, though it gets absorbed about twice as slow. So it's actually really not that much different than doing cocaine, in that the difference in dosage is only an order of magnitude, although somehow the difference is enough to make the tea completely safe and harmless as long as it isn't abused.

Smallgen, are you a member of heatsync labs or something? I was over there a couple of days ago and we randomly stumbled across this when trying to find out how much Africola somebody could drink without dying.

Although...I did post it to my website too...

Do I actually have people using my site!?!?

/kidding, probably just coincidence.

Heatsynclabs of Phoenix / Chandler?

Nope, I actually just googled how much caffeine was in a couple of energy drinks today and I came upon that site and the death by caffeine calculator and thought it was worth sharing.

> There's no caffeine in Fresca, so that won't kill you. You can go for death by sugar intake, though.

I thought Fresca was sugar free... death by sugar substitute?

And it thinks there IS caffeine in A&W Cream Soda. Hm.

These things usually vary by region or country. For example, in Canada, they only very recently (or will be soon, I can't recall for sure) lifted restrictions on caffeine in non-colas. Previously, things like Mountain Dew, Sprite, 7-up, etc., could not contain caffeine.

Mountain Dew without caffeine! I knew the Canadians couldn't be trusted.

What about the timeframe.. Is that all at once, or in a day?

About page -> What is the time frame of the Death Calculators?

http://www.energyfiend.com/2006/08/what-time-frame-for-the-d...

Summary: all at once. That would be one heckuva bathroom break.

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