Or have a heart attack, let’s say. And since drinking a hell of alot of coffee isn’t exactly scientific, let’s say how many 200mg caffeine pills.
Oh, and as far as body composition, let’s just use an average 160 male with no former heart problems.
The toxicity info you seek is freely available on the web. I would suggest refraining from consuming anything over 3 grams orally at a time, as it could result in death. Under that, one would probably just become very sick and anxious.
QtM, MD
Depends how hard you throw it.
I dont know if this will help you but durning my days working on my schools production of les mis. I took 6 caffeine pills of unknown dosage, at the time i though they we the equally horrible tasting mints, so 6 seemed like a good dose. I didnt go to the hospital but i was a mess for a few days after, It was good for the first half hour, untill i started shaking and barfing, and getting nervous as hell. I also didnt sleep for 3 days.
Because most people are too lazy to click Q.E.D.'s link, or to read a MSDS…
The LD50 for oral ingestion in rats is 192 mg/kg. That means 50% of all the 100 kg rats (heh) would be dead after eating 19.2 grams of pure caffeine.
Rats are tough sonsabitches though, so the LD50 in humans is probably less.
What does LDLo mean?
LDLo means Lethal Dose Low–the minimum amount of a substance shown to be lethal to a particular animal.
For all those people who are even lazier.
Let me take that back right now. I shouldn’t have said lazy. I should have said that a MSDS can look like a illegible jumble of letters and numbers to the layman.
Ate ten Vivarin once.
Didn’t sleep for two days, and spent the night having the dry heaves. Sweats, vasoconstriction, and a general sense of terror pervaded the whole experience. Not something I’d care to repeat…
Of course, if you have undiagnosed high blood pressure – the disease has no symptoms – a lot less caffeine could cause you to have a stroke and kill you. (HBP is not strictly speaking a heart problem).
Off the top of my head, I do remember that 24 cups of coffee in one hour is the lethal dose. No cites, but it was an academic trivia question, so I am guessing it was researched.
Not trying to poop on your figure, red_dragon, but that seems to be a pretty arbitrary figure.
It’s possible to brew two pots of coffee that can completely different in strength (ad I’d have to assume that includes caffeine), depending on what kind of beans you use, how much water, etc.
How big is a ‘cup’, by the way? I have all sorts of sizes of cups in my house. If you mean a measuring cup, i.e., ehh, like sixteen tablespoons, then I have a very hard time imagining 24 of them causing any harm, since I tend to drink my fluids out of an enormous tumbler that’s way more than 24 ounces, much less 24 cups.
Personal experience–at the height of my caffeine tolerance, I took in three 16-cup pots of coffee in in one afternoon. Very unpleasant. I was cold-sweating, shaking, unable to concentrate. My heart was beating very fast, too, and I was a distance runner then, so my heart rate was normally quite low.
Nowadays, I don’t drink nearly so much caffeine, partly because that one incident left me afraid of bursting my heart or something like that, and partly because caffeine is a major diuretic to my renal system, and if I down a cup of tea, I’m guaranteed at least two trips to the bathroom in the next hour.
Gah, this is why we need metric in this country. People really don’t know their units. A cup is 8 ounces, so 24 ounces is only three cups. And I really doubt that Lodrain is drinking eight of those tumblers an hour.
And I think that a tablespoon is (in America, at least) a third of an ounce, so there would be 24 Tbs in a cup, not 16. But I’m not sure on that one.
For personal reference: An ounce is a small shot glass (large ones are two ounces). A cup is one of those single-serving containers of yogurt, or the small carton of milk with kids’ lunches, or eight ounces. A pint is a tub of veggie dip, or the second-smallest size of margarine, or two cups. A pint of just about anything in the kitchen will weigh a pound. A quart is the tall, skinny carton of milk, or two pints. A quart is a little less than a liter. And four quarts is a gallon, which is a big milk jug.
I doubt thats true. I can drink a lot of coffee. don’t know if I ever came that close to 24/cpr but I’ve been known to put down three 12 cup pots in three hours. I’ve drank coffee for as long as I can remember though, so I have a pretty good tolerence.
When I was a kid in the 80s, a few friends and I would always get all stoned on pot and then get all coffeed out. We’d do really strange things like make extra-strong coffee in a stove top perculator, throw out the grounds and add new ones, and repeat untill we had this thick, viscous, black fluid, and then we’d do shots of it, smoke more pot and stay up all night watching Night Flight on the USA network.
Hmmmm…24 cups an hour…thats 6 cups every fifteen minutes. I bet I could do it. I Know I could. And I’m not talking about pansy assed demitasse cups either.
Jon
Nitpick, I think that a “standard” shot glass is 1.5 ounces.
No, it is 1/2 fluid ounce (16 tablespoons per cup), according to this site.
You lot really do need to go metric, don’tcha. (Mind you, don’t ask me to define a gill, a nipikin or a rumbowl, some of which are still used as units of alcoholic measure in the UK.)
Just an anecdote: a friend at school hadn’t done an essay during the day, so the night before it was meant to be handed in he decided to stay up all night and write it. To ‘assist’ himself, he drank two entire pots of coffee (10 cups) one after another. He spent the entire evening white as a sheet, sweating in abject terror, and hallucinated someone in his kitchen shouting at him. He didn’t finish the essay and had to take the next day off school sick.
Sure it does. High blood pressure. 
Cheers –
– Quothz
quothz@yahoo.com