It looked like he drank 200 cups of coffee. A measuring mistake cost him his life.
A man in Wales died after ingesting an amount of caffeine powder equivalent to as many as 200 cups of coffee.
Tom Mansfield, 29, a personal trainer and father of two, died from caffeine toxicity in January 2021, officials confirmed last week, the BBC reported.
Mansfield was trying to weigh a dose of the powder within a range of 60 milligrams to 300 milligrams. But he was using a scale that had a weighing range of 2 grams to 5,000 grams.
After consuming the powder, Mansfield started holding his chest and said his heart was beating fast. After lying down, he began foaming at the mouth, the BBC reported. His wife, identified as Suzannah, called paramedics, who were not able to resuscitate him.
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A postmortem exam showed he had caffeine levels of 392 milligrams per liter of blood, coroner John Gittins said. Caffeine levels would be 2 to 4 milligrams per liter for a person who drank a cup of coffee.
Dr. Donald Hensrud, an associate professor of preventive medicine and nutrition at the Mayo Clinic, told Paste BN: "Caffeine is metabolized at varying rates. Some people are fast metabolizers. Some people are slow metabolizers. Of course, in this situation, the dose that he consumed was so high it didn’t matter."
Dr. Deep Bhatt, a clinical instructor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, told Paste BN that "with caffeine, the recommendation is less than 400 milligrams a day is considered safe, and even beneficial. That's about four 8-ounce cups of coffee in a day."
"And as you get higher and higher in the dosages, you start to have side effects," he said.
Bhatt advised against supplementing workout powders with caffeine and encouraged those who are using caffeine powders to be “very careful” with reading instructions and labels.
Paste BN fact checkers found serious overdoses of caffeine are extremely rare. It is nearly impossible to overdose on regular brewed coffee.
The FDA estimates that a lethal does of caffeine is 10,000 to 14,000 mg.
Smaller amounts can be dangerous for children, people with underlying heart conditions and others.
A South Carolina teenager died of a "caffeine-induced cardiac event" in 2017 after consuming a large Diet Mountain Dew, a McDonald’s latte and an energy drink in about two hours.
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