It’s funny how dumb people can be about their lives.
It’s sadder than sad when they die because of it.
Humans will continue to not read, not learn, not prevent their own demise over a silly whim or a dare or just plain not paying attention.
Again, this grown up adult, college student should’ve known better. It is clearly a bad accident. And I for one don’t think Panera is at fault. They’ll make a pay out. They’ll add signage and eventually pull it off the menu.
Til the next ugly, uncomfortable, unnecessary death comes along.
I’m not convinced it’s a problem that needs a corporate solution.
In a 2018 review of scientific journal articles, researchers identified 92 reported deaths from caffeine overdose. This review included all journals since online databases began.The researchers believe that around one-third of these deaths are likely to be suicide.
… Caffeine overdose is most likely to result from taking a dietary supplement or caffeine tablets rather than from drinking coffee, especially when people combine these products with energy drinks, sodas, or coffee. Supplements increase the risk due to having higher levels of caffeine than foods and drinks.
I’m in that category, being somewhat of a Coke-fiend. I don’t drink water at home, I drink coca-cola products (okay, and also a cup of milk in the morning, with my breakfast brownie). All told, on any given day, I will drink three liters of coca-cola products. I used to drink exclusively Coke Zero, but then I started to wonder if all the caffeine might be having an affect on me that I was so accustomed to I didn’t even notice it as being due to caffeine (I mean, for years I’ve had persistent chest pain, for example, and I got to thinking this could be due to stress, but what if it’s all the caffeine I’m drinking and I just don’t realize it because it’s all I know?). So four months ago, I decided to transition to caffeine free brands.
That said, the only noticeable change since I switched to almost exclusively caffeine free drinks (caffeine free Diet Coke, Sprite Zero, and lately also Fresca, but I do still enjoy a pint of Coke Zero for lunch) was withdraw. I was tired through the day and had headaches during the transition. By now, I’ve (mostly) wheened myself off caffeinated beverages, and I don’t notice anything different (so the symptoms I was hoping might be due to caffeine really are just due to stress. Damn…).
But on the subject of taste… I have tried caffeine free Coke Zero where it’s been available—unfortunately, it seems to only come in cans, not 2-liter bottles, so it tends to be more expensive per ounce—and have not been able to tell the difference just by taste.
And finally, for those of you who think consuming three liters of Coke Zero a day must add up to an obscene amount of caffeine… it comes out to just under 290 milligrams. Spread throughout the day. Which is still 10 milligrams less than what Panera Bread was serving in mere minutes in its largest “charged lemonade” offering.
I’m going to say that if you had withdrawal symptoms when you cut the caffeine, you DID notice it, honestly, even if you weren’t consciously aware of it.
If Panera wanted long-time heavy caffeine users to have a discernable buzz from their lemonade, maybe they should have explicitly labeled it an energy drink. “Clean, plant-based, charged” doesn’t read “massively drugged”.
Do we know for certain that the woman who died had not had caffeine earlier in the day ? IIRC, the half-life of caffeine is 4-6 hours. If she’d had an 8 oz. cup of coffee four or five hours earlier, she’d still have a significant amount of caffeine in her system when she drank the caffeinated lemonade at Panera.
And IF that’s the case, there’s the possibility that even if the “charged” lemonade had less caffeine, the total amount of caffeine in her system could have been high enough to cause her demise, right?
I’m going to side with @Shalmanese and say that the issue isn’t so much that this one person happened to die shortly after consuming their product, but that apparently, so many people were gulled into overdosing on caffeine that it had become an Internet meme.
Honestly, that feels like a product that ought to be tweaked.
But no doubt the trial will explore that, should it get to a trial.
Then maybe “notice” isn’t the right word. But if the amount of caffeine in a drink makes the difference between having withdrawal symptoms and feeling fine, i think it’s enough caffeine to matter in marketing that beverage.
Except I thought I was responding to a contention that most Americans would be able to detect the presence or absence of caffeine in a drink (and let alone a drink they may never have had before) on mere taste or contemporaneous physiological response. Yes, obviously I noticed the withdrawal symptoms eventually. I even associated them with my sudden shift in caffeine intake (although, I’m the past, when I’ve had less intentional drops in caffeine intake, such as while camping, I have had similar experiences and just associated them with the rigorous of whatever I was doing, or maybe some minor illness). What I didn’t notice, and have never noticed… is a difference in taste or experience while drinking based on the presence or absence of caffeine.
Of course I have never done a blind study. Perhaps someone has? Anyway, it’s almost beside the point: I doubt very much that the young woman in this case was able to taste the abnormally high caffeine content of her drink, or that she had a noticeable physiological response until she was fatally overdosed (at which point it’s too late). If she had… maybe she’d have stopped drinking?
I can’t taste higher carbs in food (well, usually). But I will know it eventually. I don’t like to know . It’s not always pleasant. So I make it my business to find out. Guess what? You can Google almost anything. And, recheck often. Ingredients change. (Talking to you Taco Bell)
The point is, she should have known to watch out for a high caffeine product. I read she was diagnosed at age five.
By age five I was testing my glucose and self injecting insulin. I knew full well what I couldn’t have.
There’s so much missing from the story. We can never know what the heck she was thinking.
Actually, we may. That’s why I said way upthread that I’m waiting until we hear what the friends who were reported to be with her at the time end up saying, assuming that the reporting was accurate and they do come forward. The fact that they haven’t is one of the things that rings a faint bell of suspicion that maybe she did mention something along the lines of “I really shouldn’t, well, maybe just one” and they don’t want to come forward. Or again, the reporting could be plain wrong, such as all the “details” of the Maine shooter that turned out to be bunk, but are still sometimes repeated.
That’s why I’m waiting for the formal cause of death, toxicology, and likely the actual court case. Sure, enlightened speculation can be fun, but as posters we’ve alternated between scholarly and XXX-blaming. I just don’t feel the need.
And I also keep on insisting it’s not important. Someone slips and falls in a grocery store and dies, an investigator comes in and through careful scanning of the security footage, determines she slipped in aisle 4, not aisle 3 where water has been dripping from the ceiling for the last 9 months. If you are in a liability framework, you go “ok, we have proof the leak did not cause the death, my job here is done” and then you go home.
If you are in the problem solving framework, you go “What the fuck? Why has water been dripping from the ceiling for 9 months? Why were we even in a position where people could suspect our aisles are too slippery to walk in? And if nobody has fixed this ceiling leak, what else also aren’t we fixing? I’m definitely never shopping at this fucking grocery store again because clearly nobody here is invested in solving even minor problems so the amount of shit that could be wrong is unbounded”
And like, the problem isn’t Panera individually as a company, the problem is with almost all industries except a select few, in a select few areas, in a select few cultures which have built up an institutional culture of safety and design thinking such that problems are just slowly fixed systematically over time until over the long run, life is much better.
Why would you expect the friends to be talking to the media at all in this situation? I know the media loves to generate emotional stories, but friend interviews seem relegated to either really famous people or else the immediate aftermath of violent crime (eg: “He was just the nicest person you’ll ever meet and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to harm him!”) in which case it tends to be surreptitious interviews of neighbors, memorial attendees, or people showing up to court proceedings, not real hardcore investigative journalism focused on interviewing people who haven’t come forward on their own.