On Monday, Heidi Mitchell wrote “How Much Caffeine Is Too Much?” for the Wall Street Journal.
Mitchell got a pretty simple answer — 140 cups of coffee.
It is possible for a person to die from too much caffeine, “but that would mean about 14,000 milligrams, or around 140 8-ounce cups of coffee in one day,” Dr. (Matthew) Johnson says. Consuming that much would be difficult because of coffee’s self-limiting nature. “One cup makes you feel good and alert, but five cups may make you feel like your stomach is cramping,” he says. “You feel wired and you wouldn’t typically be able to go overboard.”
I know a lot of you all drink/love coffee. On Sept. 29, we celebrated National Coffee Day with a series of mug shots (I’m sorry.)
On Sept. 12, I wrote “Journalists drink more coffee than cops,” based on a study from the United Kingdom. On a sad note, on Oct. 2, Michael Barajas wrote for HoustonPress that staff at the Houston Chronicle no longer get free coffee. This summer, I also wrote about an odd PR stunt in France that put pop-up Nescafe coffee cups inside a newspaper and then encouraged readers to put that paper down and share a cup of coffee because reading a newspaper is such a lonely activity.
Nescafe clearly knows nothing of coffee or people who read newspapers. But Mitchell does. And “How Much Caffeine Too Much?” makes me feel like that third or fourth cup by 3 p.m. is not such a bad thing. Also, Mitchell reports, “caffeine intoxication” is a real thing.
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