Davideo7 : I think you're going a little overboard.

"My conclusion is that Caffeine is just as dangerous as any other drug or alcohol when overly consumed, and it doesn't take much to overdose on Caffeine."

ANYTHING even water can be dangerous if consumed to excess.

And actually ODing on Caffeine is a bit tougher than one may think, from a quick search it seems it'd take more like 1 gram to OD (7 double espressos, and that person recovered).

And yeah, if you are taking 250 mgs to stay awake it's not worth it and you should really be sleeping.

As for daily use, you'd generally want to keep it below 500 mg. So 3 or 4 cups of coffee spread through out the day would be ok from a caffeine consumption perspective. Obviously the less you use the better.

One other thing, Caffeine makes your body use up ATP reserves (ATP is what you use for energy) and so therefore if you are running on empty because you've been up for 72 hours or something caffeine won't help.

Lastly, caffeine isn't best place to get energy for or after exercise (for the reason I stated above) what you need in that case is caloric energy (you need to eat calories). Caffeine will also make you need to go to the bathroom so again for exercise not the most helpful.

As for sleeping, caffeine has a half-life of about 6 hours, which means if you have 100 mgs of caffeine then you would have about 50 mg in your system after 6 hours.

As for sleeping generally once you have around 100 mg in you it becomes either: tough to sleep or you do not get down to stage 3 or 4 of sleep and just stay at stage 2 and thus you wake up tired because you didn't sleep well. At one point I stopped drinking caffeine after about 4 in the afternoon and that helped out a bit.

Now I generally consume at most 150 mg a day (it's really probably more like 120 or so most days). And I know most of the above from writing a paper on it during my undergraduate days.

I remember hearing that eating an apple will actually be more beneficial for your energy levels than caffeine will (long term). Sure, caffeine will probably wake you up faster to begin with but long term eating something healthy (like an apple) will be better.

Plus I've never OD'd on apples

i remember hearing about this in health class and thought "pfft, yeah right!" i guess i now know it is true i don't drink caffeine at all much, never had coffee or energy drinks, and i guess i know why not to know good thing you are all right now

MichaelVash7886 : My point is, it's not hard to overdose on caffeine, especially now days with so many products having caffeine in them and some of them having ridiculous amounts.

geeogree : Yeah I've heard that too, as well as other fruit. Days that I work out I try to get some fruit such as Apples, Bananas and Pineapple. Sometimes even Coconut water, which is suppose to have more potassium than Bananas.

I had to talk my roommate down from a caffeine overdose a few weeks back. She makes her coffee incredibly strong (I have to dilute it 50/50 with milk to make it palatable, and it's still a lot stronger than my usual cup), and drinks it black-and-sweet from a one-pint cup. On top of that, she had a Red Bull. *facepalms*

So, she's getting the heart palpitations, and I'm going through the clinical symptoms of a heart attack (Does it feel like there's an elephant on your chest? Are you feeling pain radiating down your arm?) and I know that if I have to call 911 at 3AM, I can not go with her (9-y-o at home and with school the next morning). She eventually started coming down from it, and I now have permission to take energy drinks out of her hand if we're shopping and she picks one up.

(For the curious, drinking too much water can kill you by causing your salt and potassium levels to plummet. There was actually a case where a radio station did a contest called 'Hold your wee for a Wii', involving drinking loads of water, and a lady died of hyponatremia.)

Oniya : Wow that's bad, most people don't realize just how much caffeine coffee has, it's insane.

Fortunately I've got a pretty good heart and so I didn't feel it in my heart but I had enough other bad symptoms.

That's to bad about that lady, that's just crazy, I bet that radio station was sued.