What time frame for the Death by Caffeine Calculator
The one question, by orders of magnitude, that gets asked here more than any other is: “It says that 10 bottles would kill me, but is that over a month, a day, a lifetime?!”
Let’s apply some common sense to this.
If you died after a lifetime consumpution of 200 cans of soda, most Americans wouldn’t make it past age 14. That’s clearly not the answer.
If you died after 200 cans of soda in a month, well, most of the loyal readers here might not have made it past age 30. It’s painfully easy to drink 6 cans daily, especially if you’re trying to stay awake to finish a project. Conversely, it’s about 142 cups of coffee for me. That’s under 5 per day. I can drink more than that with few side effects. It’s not monthly.
Weekly? That’s just a stupid measurement.
Daily? That’s actually believable. If you managed to ingest that much caffeine in one day, you won’t be feeling so hot. In fact you may be in serious trouble. Not everyone’s liver works at the same speed, and some people have reported feeling the effects of caffeine for a full 12 hours - for most people this is more like 4-5 hours.
Here’s the answer: IT’S HOW MUCH YOU HAVE TO HAVE IN YOUR SYSTEM AT ONE TIME.
Yes, it means that it’s practically impossible to kill yourself with caffeine. Practically. Don’t actually try it! After 1 gram, you’ll be a sad panda. If you manage to even challenge the number, you’ll be a schizophrenic, crazed panda, or a passed out panda. And if you’re passed out, you might get your wallet stolen.
89 Comments
I’m 14, and I consume anywhere from 200-700mg of caffeine daily. Since I’ve drank Diet Pepsi since i was 7, i think i’ve built up a good resistance to caffeine. With 650mg, I can usually stay up till 7am, but then what’s the point of going to sleep? haha
@KevinG
-Everything is radioactive, at least a little bit. but i think the expression he meant to say was chemically processed in 4 hours, meaning the body wipes it out of the system. this is, afaik, not true. its at *least* four hours, and like the site says, it can be as long as twelve. it really depends heavily on the person.
i drink at least, AT LEAST, 10 cups of coffee a day, and I’m only about 17…so then i shoudn’t live past like 30…damn.
U guys are hyper nut jobs, im 12, and have maybe 200-400mg of caffeine daily. But nooo, u have to have 1.8grams(1800mg). CRAZYYY!! Email me at youtuber.rigitoni@gmail.com with ANY q’s on any energy drink 
I drink about 3-4 POTS of coffee a day. I’m not talking about “sissy” coffee either. The coffee I make could peel the chrome off a car bumper. I’m 30 and have been doing this since college (10 years). Some people call me an addict. Nah, I’m just a man who loves his coffee. There haven’t been many side effects. One more thing, ADHD and caffeine are a great combination.
well crack i mean caffeine must really like me. i realy drink about 5-7 24 oz bottles of dew and 3-4 32 coffees every day and have been for over 20 years and i feel fine. i do know if i stop i feel like crap. it does help i work at a dinner and it is free. lol in most of these energy drinks the sugar will get to you before the caffeine will
Since I was about 17 I have kept a daily intake of about 3 grams or so (5 grams during colder less active seasons), It would be difficult to see 14.5grams of caffeine killing me.
I do not drink coffee at all.I am 19 and a college student, get about 3-4 hours of sleep on weekdays because of the study, and few all nighters a month due to essays and such. And I do not drink coffee at all. And since high school I have not been getting enough sleep, but still can survive without coffee. I also do not drink sports or energy drinks, tea is the only coffee intake for me, and not much of that either.
Is it not crazy, college student who does not drink coffee.
Enthusiasm and adrenalin are usually enough to get a person through the day. The key is to take hard classes with hard tests, this way a thought of a test can keep you awake for couple nights before, and after the test.
Actually drinking the indicated amount of pure water at one time (several gallons) means a sure death :), you would not need caffeine.
You’re all NUTS!!!! I don’t take in ANY stimulant of ANY kind, EVER, and I never have a problem getting through the day or staying up late if I have to. The human body is an incredible machine and with the right diet and exercise, you shouldn’t NEED these stimulants!
Really, how true is this? There was a person that died from 6 cans of Red Bull and he was an athelete, with his weight, it should have taken him maybe 120 cans, not 6…….. go figure!
Krisk and Kris are TWO different people!
…I have pure chemical grade caffeine. I can put away 3-4 gram shots of it for kicks. To a perfectly healthy (as in not fatigued through lack of sleep); your body can handle roughly up to 39g at a time. This will destroy your liver and all, however the warnings on the side of the bottles are extreme safety warnings.
The short story is: Unless your a freak like me and actually have the chemical C8 H10 N4 O2—Don’t worry about it. You’ll fill yourself up on any energy drink before you’ll do damage.
so in the last 4 or so hours i have been cramming for 2 tests, and i have consumed about 1.67g of caffeine and i am still going. actually it takes approximately 10g of caffeine in a healthy adult(at one time) to cause death.
What’s interesting to note is that caffeine is actually a virulent poison. In nature, scientists have found that some plants create caffeine in the same manner that other plants create toxins. It is to keep insects and animals from eating it. It usually kills any insect without instincts to protect it and sickens animals who eat it. This is similar to nicotine, alcohol, and other such intoxicants. The only reason humans can ingest it recreationally is because we have hardened our resistance to the poison over centuries.
Just thought you’d find this interesting.
Crushing caffeine into powder into the grams required to get an LD50 or even LD100 (Which isn’t exactly true because everyone has different tolerances to caffeine or most substances). Even before hitting LD50, your body will start to feel the terrible effects of it.
Most of the deaths that occur from over doses of caffeine usually die from ventricular fibrillation which is the uncoordinated contractions of the cardiac muscle of the ventricles in the heart. As a result the heart fails to adequately pump blood and hypoxia will occur, normally followed by unconsciousness within 20 - 30 seconds and quickly after, death.
Heh, I bought 1KG of pure USp28 grade caffine, from a site I found through ebay. Cost almost $200, but at the rate i take it (about 3G per day, I measure it with an elctric scale) it will last for quite some time.
@ Tony
“NOT for children, pregnant women, or PEOPLE SENSITIVE TO CAFFEINE.”
@ BrokenAntiMatter
How round are you? You’d need a pretty huge gut to consume that much caffeine. Also, 1cc of pure caffeine taken intraveiniously would kill you within 10 minutes (or less…)
man, i only have about 200mg per day, if that, usually just skip a day here or there, cause it can quickly increase your blood pressure, and if you keep a steady intake, and stop, you pressure will lower too fast and you could die. just watch out for that.
man i think i consume too much caffeine.
according to the calculator, i consume 9g per day, and some times as many as 13. (my record is 17). I guess i kinda just built up a tolerance
turns out i recently tried 5hr energy drink, a 2 oz shot of concentrated caffeine. in the day it made me all jittery. so i decided to go and find out how much caffeine this thing had. it claimed it had approx a cup of coffee worth of caffeine. in my organic chemistry class, we did just such an experiment measuring the amount of caffeine in caffeinated drinks. turns out the stuff had 4.73g caffeine per Liter of stuff. or 140mg/oz of caffeine. that adds up to 280 total in the bottle. the LD50 for rats is 200mg per kg rat body weight, so this drink would kill a rat!! rat poison on sale under the name of energy drink. according to wikipedia, as low as 2g caffeine have killed people b4 although these are rare occurences. that means about 15 bottles of this stuf could have been the killer of one of these people. so in all actuality, you could actually die from this dam thing if you wer stupid
Dave, 200mg and 2g aren’t the same- 2g+ 2,000mg, that’s a hell of a lot of caffeine to ingest at once and if it hit you all at once (such as by popping 10 No-Doz pills), I’m sure you’d be in for an awful time, and risking serious injury or death. 280mg is like 2 cups of coffee, 2g is more equal to 20.
Wouldn’t drinking some insanely large amount of coffee (20 cups for example) be more likely to just cause severe vomiting than any caffeine-related complication?
Er, the “+” after the 2g in my first sentence should have been an “=”, sorry 
i am about 16 and since my 2nd liver transplant i think i am resistant to caffine compleatly as the person whos liver i got was like 500 lbs. i have taken in like 4-5g of caffine in a little less then a day on most fridays.
p.s. dont ask about the other 2 livers plz
ok how i look at energy drinks is that i dont drink them you want to kno y i drank 3 through out the day and when i was cheering at a football game they had to escort me to the hosptial cause i was bout to have a heart attack and die so much for my 18 birthday so i will not and i tell people all the time that they shouldnt drink them they kill
I think caffeine sucks. i’ve never touched the stuff. Coffe smells weird and coke/pepsi is nasty. I don’t suggest everyone dose the same, but it’s better than getting addicted in the first place…
Hi, I’m a 22 years old guy. I’m still up from a whole night awake(work). Getting no more than 2 1/2 hours sleep everyday since last monday. I know that I could not have done it without drinking a least one VitaminEnergy. After I drink this poison my mind accelerates like a car on Nitro, leaving the sleep, the bored and tired sensations away. But boy, doesn’t these niceties come at a price. After I get home, (like today) I can’t go to sleep at all. My mind keeps going. Instead of feeling tired, as I know I should, I start playing high pace, action video games or looking for anything to do, but sleep. Besides from the killer insomnia, the hot blood feeling when I touch my forehead and neck, the massive bags under my eyes, and the addicting effect that starts to build up, I get a drive towards releasing some body fluids, which is not nice when you are at work or want to finish studying, if you know what I mean But I feel that these drinks are just hiding the true condition of tiredness my body is feeling; like putting the mind under anesthesia. You know the pain is there, but you just don’t feel it. After all, we know that sleep regenerates/recharge your body and mind getting the neurons foods while your at it; without sleep, we’re just fooling our brain. replacing this process with a fake, cheap and long term most costly method. Just like I survived this week, once I drank one can, came home, and try to go sleep without success. So, I just had to buy another one, just to get me trough the next working/studying day. As you might see, it’s like a snowball-going-downhill effect. Sleep and myself are just not friends anymore. But hey, somebody has to pay the bills. Anyway, this is a great and informative web page. By now you should see what I meant when I said about my mind going on Nitro mode, normally I don’t write this much, lol. Not a good thing indeed.
wow. caffeine is real interesting. yea. my favorite energy drink is a no-fear!
monster and ephedrine is the key!
Today i experimented with Caffeine. I took ~1.2-1.5 grams of pure food grade caffeine within 25 minutes. Then i tracked my symptoms. I agree, i was not a happy panda. I had a fever, cold sweats, confusion, muscle spasms, heavy breathing, high pulse rate, anxiousness, irritability… the list goes on. It was definitely something i wont do much more often. Its killing me. But as per my experiment i must go another day without caffeine. so no drinks with caffeine in them for me =[ i’m thinking of quitting over the summer. As for the rest of you, DON’T EVER experiment with pure caffeine. even though people say its not deadly about 3-5 grams can hospitalize someone and 10 grams will kill you.
My experiments outlines:
Take ~1-1.5 grams of pure food grade caffeine within 30 minutes and catalog the effects 1 hour, 12 hours, and 24 hours later(detox).
i just had eight no-doz and im feeling really tired and im not sure why??? Am I ok
@KevinG:
The biological half-life of a substance is the time it takes for a substance (drug, radioactive nuclide, or other) to lose half of its pharmacologic, physiologic, or radiologic activity, as per the MeSH definition.
That’s what they’re referring to, not radioactive half-life
At any rate, their calculations are still wrong. Even after 7 half-lives, the substance is still 1/128 effective as compared to the original dose.
Lots of things can increase the biological half-life of caffeine, as well. Oral contraceptives in women increase it to 5-10 hours, pregnancy increases it to 9-11 hours. Individuals with severe liver disease can experience a caffeine half-life of up to 96 hours!
Smoking (among other things) actually shortens the half-life of caffeine.
For people saying that caffeine kills: You are special cases, a “normal” dose (I’ll say 200mg) can mess with some peoples hearts. (like “lyndsey” up there) This doesn’t mean that it’s evil and nobody should touch it…it just means that YOU shouldn’t touch it. Hell, one of my friends found out that he has acid reflux, he used to have tons of caffeine and just pop in general, but he can’t do that now. He isn’t even supposed to have chocolate. Does this mean that chocolate is evil? No, it means there’s something wrong with HIM specifically. His case is less common than normal.
For most people, 200mg is no problem to ingest, no real ill effects to be seen.(or else all of those people with just a cup or two of coffee a day would go insane) Then there’s people like me (and many of the posters on here) who are very resistant to caffeine. I can start drinking Monsters in the middle of the night and still feel just as drowsy as I would without caffeine, but just not be able to sleep.
tl;dr
Caffeine isn’t a menacing poison that nobody should intake; you’re just a freak and you shouldn’t be posting on a caffeine-freak website!! 
i have consumed 3 bookoo energy drinks (360mg caffeine) in less than 1 hr, and all that happened to me was my hands shook and i couldnt aim worth shit.
i was not a sad panda, schizophrenic, crazed panda, or a passed out panda. ima call bs on your data
@ the first few comments… I wasn’t aware that caffeine was radioactive. I suppose, it makes sense pharmaceutically though. I consume 1.5g to 1.8g of caffeine daily via Spike Shooter, so I think I’m pretty resistant to Caffeine.