Caffeinated Fun

I’m torn between seeing this as modestly inventive and mildly pointless. You can calculate the lethal dose for caffeine in units of your favorite caffeinated beverage. For my usual morning drip coffee and my body weight (100.6 kg, measured yesterday), a lethal dose would be 104.49 cups.

Using the caffeine database (a nice touch, but references for the caffeine contents of different beverages and foods would have been even nicer), I figured out that the 104.49 cups, 145 mg per 8 oz cup, comes out to 15,151 mg of caffeine or about 150 mg/kg. It was a little tough to ground-truth this value – most of the references I found on caffeine hazard assessment when Googling “median lethal dose caffeine humans” were of the more sensible variety, such as this or this (courtesy of “A Small Dose Of. . .”). This MSDS gives the median lethal dose in humans at 192 mg/kg, but they don’t give a source for that value. My workhorse resource, TOXNET notes that the lethal dose of caffeine in adults appears to be about 5 to 10 g, though it doesn’t say anything about how big these adults are, or give a statistical basis for that dose (you can tell a lot about how much someone knows of toxicology based on whether or not they refer to the LD50 as “the dose that kills 50% in a group. . .”).

If this seems a heavy-handed response to essentially a humorous discussion on caffeine, my apologies, but I’m an introvert. Thanks to Majikthise for the link.