Genuine question: does that mean when people die after consuming way too much caffeine, it's not because of "caffeine toxicity" per se, but because the effects of the caffeine put too much strain on their body?
It would need to be in powder form or concentrated in something far beyond natural levels of coffee/tea/matcha/etc.
The lowest example of a lethal dose I can find in the literature is 57mg/kg. Caffeine overdoses are so rare that we don't know the true distribution, but it's clearly not the case that millions people will die from a few coffees.
Your other comment calculated the lethal dose as *a gallon of espresso*. That's like 125 shots. That is not a remotely normal amount of coffee. It would take multiple people over an hour to make that much espresso for you.
---
Edit: I can't reply, but "LD1" isn't a group of people and you can't just claim it's 1% of the population. LD50 doesn't imply anything about the population distribution or how it varies by person. It refers to a particular experimental set up (or estimate from a natural experiment) in which 50% of the subjects died after a certain dosage.
For example, the LD50 of falling is ~50ft. Some people will be more susceptible to dying by falling a certain distance than others, but there are many other factors involved and it makes no sense to say someone is in 1% of falling-death-probability.
I agree that LD50 doesn't tell you everything you'd want to know, like the lowest possible dose that might kill someone. There might be people who are extremely sensitive to a substance, or situations in which it's particularly dangerous (in combination with other substances or another health condition, for example). For something safe and widely used like caffeine, I'd expect that the vast majority of people would experience roughly similar toxicity (say, within 2x of the median) with a tiny population of outliers; but you can't just assume that there's 1% of the population that's drastically more sensitive.
(cc @dang, seeing this growing trend of people misunderstanding the missing reply button and evading the timer via edits, perhaps UI affordances could be developed to better introduce folks to the feature?)
Similarly with caffeine content "can be". All kinds of variables like roasting time affect the dose But the semi-standardized dose for a cup of coffee is about 100mg. Related to your link, they are a much larger cup of coffee for comparison. If you normalize it to the standard coffee size, it comes to 100mg caffeine, so right in line with what would be expected.
Also, FWIW the LD50 can be calculated with censored populations (ie not all subjects have died.) Think about it: if I administer a dose that kills half but leaves the other half living, the LD50 remains unchanged even if I continue increasing the dosage until all have died (or not). LD50 does not require a complete set.
(based on 36ml espresso having 110mg caffeine, LD50 caffeine is 150-200mg/kg)
Healthy kidneys work through around a litre of blood a minute, so my guess is that, ahem, "breaking the seal" would keep caffeine levels in check.
Are there other caffeine delivery mechanisms that differ? Of course, but that’s not what the OP asked. The question was about the toxicity of coffee. That’s why it’s not worth arguing when something like caffeine powder provides the majority of ODs. Likewise there’s going to be variation in toxicity between individuals but those numbers are intended to be generalizable numbers to a population.