A calculation to see how many cups of coffee you would need to drink in order to kill yourself.
I thought it might be interesting to do some back of the envelope calculations to bring to you, some information on how many cups of coffee to avoid drinking, so as to not kill yourself. However, this calculation is not as easy as it sounds…
… the funny thing is, by the next day, that 2500mg would have been metabolized or cleared itself and only about 50mg of this is left behind. Which means that the net total amount of caffeine still in a person’s system if he or she were to continue drinking a cup of coffee every 24 minutes for a 48 hour period is 2550mg (2500mg + 50mg).
It turns out that your body is potentially quite capable of dealing with such a heavy coffee dosage, because that new 2550mg level becomes 53mg by the next 24hours – therefore three days of drinking a cup of coffee every 24 minutes will result in a net retention of 2553mg (2500mg + 53mg) and so on. I haven’t had a chance to extrapolate this over the full year (365 days), but I’m pretty sure that even a constant coffee drinking regime (1 cup every 24 minutes for the full year) wouldn’t work out to a retention amount above the lethal dose.
(HT John Rennie)