Part of that has to do with the actual substance (Dr. Drinking 25 cups of coffee is insane, but wouldn't have the same immediate effect as snorting or swallowing pure powder. Broderick reminded me, ' Coffee is to a square as caffeine is to a rectangle'-they just aren't the same thing. This gets to what the FDA wrote in their statement about pure caffeine powder: It's dangerous because 'a single teaspoon roughly equivalent to the amount in 25 cups of coffee.' But as Dr. (If you don't feel like reading the academic study from 1967, try this handy calculator instead.) Caffeine is most toxic when consumed intravenously, but can also reach lethal levels by 'oral, rectal, or subcutaneous routes.' The lethal dose depends on the administration of the drug, but it seems to be somewhere around 200 milligrams per kilogram-slightly more if you're consuming it through your butt, and slightly less if you're consuming it through your veins. I found the same conclusions in a really old study on ' factors affecting caffeine toxicity.' The study-basically a review of preexisting research-points out that caffeine affects people differently on the basis of age, gender, body mass, tolerance to the drug, any concomitant disorders, and any other drugs the person may have consumed. Broderick, who added that young people also have much lower tolerances.

'Women are much more susceptible to the effects of caffeine than are men,' said Dr. That's because caffeine tolerance is a highly individualized thing. Our conversation got off to a rough start ('Can somebody overdose on caffeine? No, no, caffeine can't kill you,' was, oddly, the first thing she said), but she eventually told me something interesting: We just don't really know how much caffeine it takes to put you in lethal danger. Patricia Broderick who, among many other medical accolades, is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Caffeine Research. So there are a lot of figures floating around out there. But in 2011 a girl died from 'caffeine toxicity' after drinking just two cans of Monster-only 480 milligrams of caffeine, roughly the same amount in a Venti-sized Starbucks coffee. Other sources suggest it's more like ten grams, which would be like downing 50 shots of 5-Hour Energy. A study from 2005, which investigated two caffeine-related deaths, suggested that you'd have to ingest around five grams of caffeine-more than ten times the FDA's figure-to overdose. But how much caffeine, exactly, does it take to kill you? The FDA says that you can safely consume about 400 milligrams per day, but it's extremely unlikely that you'll die even if you consume more than that (400 milligrams is roughly equal to four eight-ounce cups of joe).

Whats a caffeine overdose