If you're like me, you drink a lot of coffee. And if you drink a lot of coffee, then you probably wonder, "How much coffee would it take to kill me?" In medieval times, man had to make due with tea leaves, the arrangement of the planets, and pieces of the True Cross to come up with answers to this question. The answers were inaccurate and usually ended up in the killing of Jews and Muslims for no good reason. But, hey, that's medieval times for you.

Thanks to Joseph Lister and the Internet, we no longer have to worry about mysticism when it comes to answering this age-old question of caffeine poison. A blog called "Energy Fiend" has written a script for determining how much of any caffeine drink it would take to kill you. Just select your drink of choice from the drop-down menu and input your weight. The computer does the rest. For example, a 110 lb. person like myself would have to drink 259 cans of A&W Creme Soda before it killed him. That's a lot of soda! And I don't have to worry about drinking too much coffee; I would need to drink 70 cups of brewed coffee before it killed me.

The LD50 (the lethal dose that would kill 50% of the population) of caffeine is about 10 grams (10,000 mg) when administered orally. This varies by the weight of the individual, of course (source). The LD50 for all weight levels seems to be 150 mg of caffeine per kg of person (so, if you weigh 50 kg, the lethal dose of caffeine for you is 7500 mg). Brewed coffee contains between 4 and 20 mg of caffeine per ounce of coffee, meaning 32-160 mg in a typical 8 oz. cup of coffee. This translates into 62.5 8-oz. cups of coffee as being a lethal dose at the highest threshold of caffeine concentration. A caffeinated soft drink, by contrast, contains only 3-8 mg of caffeine per ounce, or 36-96 mg per 12-oz. can (source). The Energy Fiend blog also has a database of caffeine content, which is presumably where the script's "lethal" measurements come from.

Interestingly, Red Bull -- that favorite solvent of amateur, underage partygoers everywhere -- has only 9.64 mg of caffeine per ounce. If you want to party well into the night, better stick with Irish coffee, which contains 53.8 mg of caffeine per ounce of whiskey, as opposed to the Red Bull and vodka, which contains 25.7 mg of caffeine per ounce of vodka.

Also keep in mind that, not only does the same amount of coffee contain 1.4 times as much caffeine as Red Bull, but Red Bull's MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) is $1.99 for an 8.3-oz. can, or $0.24 per ounce of Red Bull, while a 32.5-oz. can of Maxwell House ground coffee will produce 270 6-oz. cups of coffee (1,620 fl. oz. of liquid coffee) at normal strength for $7, or $0.0043 per fluid ounce of coffee. A can of Red Bull with the same caffeine content as the 1,620 oz. of coffee which that $7 can would produce (21,772.8 mg) would cost $643. So, maybe Red Bull is a little overpriced.

[Link to "Death by Caffeine" via Boing Boing.]