How Much Caffeine Would Kill You?

[John Funk]

How Much Caffeine Would Kill You?

An online calculator can figure out exactly how much of your favorite energy drink / soda / coffee / etc. it would take to do you in via caffeine overdose.

Despite being a wonderful miracle worker, caffeine does have its side effects - it is, after all, a psychoactive substance. Along with warding off drowsiness and giving a quick burst of energy, caffeine can make us irritable and nervous, it can make us jumpy, and if taken in sufficiently high doses ... caffeine can kill.

But how much of it would kill you? There's a handy little calculator [http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine] that aims to answer just that! It's got quite the list of drinks and other substances, so put in your favorite caffeinated meal of choice and see how many you'd have to ingest in order to croak from caffeine overdose.

Here's what I got:

Kit Kat bars - 2548 bars
Red Bull - 191.1 cans
Monster - 95.55 cans
Jolt Energy - 54.6 cans
Mountain Dew - 277.96 cans
Mountain Dew Game Fuel - 127.4 bottles
Starbucks Grande Caffe Mocha - 87.36 cups
Wired X344 - 44.44 cans

As we can see, it would take quite a bit of Mountain Dew - not to mention a veritable mountain of Kit Kat bars - to put me under. Mountain Dew Game Fuel is more lethal than Red Bull, but not as dangerous as Monster. A Starbucks Grande Caffe Mocha might be more caffeinated than those energy drinks, but it doesn't have anything on Jolt. Even Jolt can't stand up to Wired X344, though. A mere 45 cans of that stuff would do me in.

Caffeine is the gamer's best friend - the concept that it could send us to the Great Arcade in the Sky seems almost like a betrayal, of sorts. On the bright side, though, the lethal dose of caffeine is so effectively high it's not something we really need to worry about.

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[Rhayn]

Oh dear, only 130 cups of brewed coffee. Better stop drinking now that I'm on my 101st.

In all seriousness though, I imagine some of the other stuff they put in those things would kill you before the caffeine.

 

[Abedeus]

2,5k Kit Kat bars?

I dare to say that you would get a heart attack if you are so many IN A ROW.

Oh dear, only 130 cups of brewed coffee. Better stop drinking now that I'm on my 101st.

In all seriousness though, I imagine some of the other stuff they put in those things would kill you before the caffeine.

sort... of... ninja'd?

 

[EeveeElectro]

In one sitting, or over a life time?

 

[John Funk]

On <a href='http://www.energyfiend.com/the-caffeine-database' target=_blank>this page at the site it states:

How accurate is pop-up caffeine calculator?
It provides a rough gauge of reaction to caffeine - and typically corresponds to the amount of caffeine in your system over a 4 hour period. There is obviously enormous variation between individual response - and this should be construed as entertainment only (see item 13 in the source reference for more).

 

[Milkman Dan]

In one sitting, or over a life time?

Depends on how long you live, I suppose.

 

[rossatdi]

I once heard it took around one hundred cups of coffee in under five hours to kill you, I can't remember where I read it though, so I have no cite *sigh*.

I'm pretty sure you'd opt for decaf before you got to 100!

 

[asinann]

To kill yourself with caffeine you would pretty much have to get an iv full of it and just soak it up, before it killed you, you'd get too jittery to drink or eat any more.

 

[Brokkr]

It would be very hard to consume enough of some of those drinks in the 4 hour period to actually kill you.

Pretty cool though.

 

[Slycne]

In all seriousness though, I imagine some of the other stuff they put in those things would kill you before the caffeine.

Not even necessarily other ingredients, you would die of hyperhydration aka water intoxication in some of these cases. Assuming you can keep it all down.

In one sitting, or over a life time?

One sitting, just like alchohol; caffeine is processed out of your system. So to even have a chance of completing this you would need to consume quickly.

 

[Incredible Bullshitting Man]

Might be easier to drown myself in a barrel full of coffee then drinking 100 cups within five hours. Yeah, I like coffee but not that much.

EDIT: Actually, I´m pretty sure there´s nothing that wouldn´t kill you, if consumed an enormous amount.

 

[Eri]

I'm with Khell. I'd die of a stomach explosion before I even got half the required cans down.

 

[shMerker]

Also, you'll probably start hallucinating [http://www.livescience.com/health/090113-coffee-hallucinations.html] long before it kills you.

 

[BoredKellon]

Hmmm...It seems they have a Tim Horton's Large Coffee, but they do not have my weapon of choice, the X-Large.

 

[Cousin_IT]

349cans of coke
294cans of dr pepper
2407cups of hot cocoa
2006kit kats
241bottles of lipton ice tea
317cans of pepsi
354cans of vanilla coke

looks like im safe, though id prod die from the sugar long before consuming that much caffine

 

[Ago Iterum]

The most I can manage is one can on Jolt anyway. They're biiiig.

 

[ryukage_sama]

Based on LD50 of orally administered caffeine for rats (that is the dose at which half of the test population dies), it would take ~17.5 grams of caffeine to kill half of a group of 200 lb humans. (Rats are a good toxicity model for most substances).
http://msds.chem.ox.ac.uk/CA/caffeine.html

You can poison someone with a such an amount, but you would have to spike someone's drink with a lot of pure powdered caffeine to make the dose high enough. People do frequently overdose on caffeine experiencing 'the shakes', heart palpitations, and sometimes hallucinations (although nothing like what LSD is known to induce). Emergency Room visits are sometimes needed after 4-8 energy drinks in a single night.

As with many small molecules, caffeine is your friend, but like many of our friends, sometimes we need a break from them.