A personal trainer died after taking caffeine powder the equivalent of up to 200 cups of coffee, an inquest heard.
At one time, that is – not drinking 200 cups, which would take a lot of time, but taking 200 cups’ worth of caffeine all at once.
Caffeine is used by some gym-goers, with some fitness websites recommending it for improving sports performance in certain doses. However, experts have warned that when taking powders there is a risk of consuming over the recommended amount.
On Tuesday an inquest heard Mr Mansfield began clutching his chest and complaining his heart was beating fast after consuming the product. Minutes later, after going to lie down, he began foaming at the mouth.
And then he died.
The hearing was told the scales Mr Mansfield had used to measure the powder had a weighing range from two to 5,000 grams, whereas he was attempting to weigh a recommended dose of 60-300mg.
Caffeine is powerful stuff. Be careful.
Comments
22 responses to “Grams and milligrams”
As a once was gym owner, I could make your hair curl with some of the things meatheads use to get bigger bodies. Mostly upper bodies, only the truly serious did the hard work of legs. Most of them were chicken legs.
Darwin award contender?
Very sad – it looks like it wasn’t really a matter of taking a crazy dose to get results; rather, a bad miscalculation. If the article was accurate, it seems that (1) he was aiming for about 2 coffee cups worth (200mg), and (2) was aware that the scale measured grams, rather than milligrams, but (3) translated “milli” to a factor of 10, rather than 1000. I’ve certainly made mistakes in units & orders of magnitude, but I think I would double-check my figures before ingesting anything…
Why mess around with powder when a cup of dark roast from Starbucks is good for a 4 minute mile or figuring out just how bizarre Judith Butler is. :P
He’s not alone in killing himself doing dumb shit, just a bit slower.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/127917979/steroid-dealer-dr-phil-died-with-a-heart-three-times-heavier-than-normal
It’s good to keep in mind that many substances that we get from plants are made by the plant in order to deter/disable/kill animals that eat it.
You mean they’re not put there by an intelligent designer in order to provide us with joy, pleasure, or a buzz? I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you! :-)
“a cocktail of drugs – methamphetamine, MDMA (ecstasy) and anabolic steroids”
Very wise.
An exercise in superior judgement for sure.
This is why I use a 50mg scoop to dose myself (sometimes with 300 mg worth)… A tablespoon is a lethal dose iirc.
My pouch of anhydrous caffeine has lasted many years.
Reminds me of this cautionary tale:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-38744307
(At least in that case no-one actually died.)
Pro Tip: check your work carefully.
Any advice on how to sniff petrol (gasoline.)? I’m told that doing it while smoking something (a joint; cigarette) can give me an extra high.
Omar, yeah: don’t. At least not without either knowing the exact composition of your gasoline, or keeping the exposure under 2250 mg/m^3/h, with the further caveat that the effective/toxic concentration may vary with concurrent ingestion of other toxins:
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.93101s6115
(I presume you weren’t serious, but technically..,)
Omar, depends on the fuel/air ratio. Get it right, you’ll go very high indeed.
I encountered someone on Facebook just last week who thought that ‘milli-‘ meant ‘a thousand times’ (I immediately corrected her!). If you didn’t encounter the metric system (micro-, milli-, centi-, deci-, kilo-, etc.) whilst still at school, so weren’t taught what each prefix meant, it’s surprisingly hard as an adult to learn. There will be plenty of people out there that don’t even know that ‘mg’ stands for ‘milligrams’ and would just ignore the ‘m’ when weighing stuff.
This is a tragedy, ultimately attributable to a confluence of toxic social influences as much as the toxic substances involved — yes, a certain amount of “toxic masculinity”, but also general vanity and luxury posturing and the ever-present urge to attract a mate.
In ages past, working-class people (which was almost all people) would as a matter of course develop layers of muscle and fat that allowed them to use their bodies to the extent their labour required; go back far enough, to the hunter-gatherer days, and everyone looked like Rambo, even the women — which is to say that Rambo looks like a chimpanzee without all the body hair. They did not need gyms and steroids and supplements to achieve this “look”, as it wasn’t a “look” at all, but rather an integral component in their individual and collective survival.
Many of those “primitive” peoples apparently idealised obesity, especially in women, as a sign of wealth and fecundity. Many figurines display the worship and adoration of a curvaceous female form that simply could not have been obtained by the vast majority of women hunter-gatherers, for example.
After we settled into agricultural and then industrial societies, Rambo went away because the nature of our habits and our diets changed. Even then, until quite recently, the average person was quite physically strong and capable as a matter of course; even many well-off working people spent much of their non-working lives engaged in heavy chores for their households, especially in the countryside.
In our own age of milk and honey, obesity is considered a disease. Many of us spend most of the day sitting and thinking, and then those of us who aspire to Rambo must trade hours of our free time in pursuit of what has become an unattainable aesthetic ideal. And in this gap of attainability come steroids, supplements, bespoke diets, and all manner of religious orders over how to attain the unattainable.
But it will always be so, in some form or another, as long as we yearn for what we cannot have, and as long as we feel the deep urge to attract and keep a mate.
Finally. Pay attention in math, kids. The life it saves could be your own.
Also, this solecism: “Caffeine levels would typically be two to four milligrams per litre if someone had drunk a cup of filter coffee.”
“Filter coffee.”
I encountered that in a book the other day (the very lovely Among Others, by Jo Walton). I gather it’s intended to differentiate that fancy coffee made from ground-up beans from the normal freeze-dried stuff.
We would presume that a professional trainer would have had to at least studied physiology in order to get their training job, no? And that would mean learning about how muscle development works, and how dangerous additives and supplements can be if not used carefully.
But in my experience, trainers are actually more expected to be salespeople for selling more training sessions, who run you through a bunch of exercises and then get to the contract details.
“Filter coffee” is a term used to differentiate espresso (water forced at pressure through coffee grounds) from pour-over (an extremely popular manual brewing method) or typical coffee machine coffee, both of which involve mixing water into the coffee grounds and allowing the mixture to drip through a filter (hence “filter coffee”). Some use the term only to apply to pour-over, rather than machines.
Caffeine content differs based on a lot of factors, including grind size, brewing time, and brewing method. I came across this excellent article in which they actually performed rigorous tests and measured the caffeine content using 15 brew methods. What I liked in particular is that they captured both caffeine content per volume and caffeine content per typical serving.
(I don’t agree with the commonly overloaded term “strong” to refer to any or all of “concentrated”, “flavorful”, and “high caffeine”. Those are different concepts that don’t vary together. I prefer to use “strong” to refer to flavor, but the article uses it to refer to caffeine. You can tell at a sip when coffee is flavorful or concentrated, but you can’t tell caffeine content.)
https://www.coffeeness.de/en/how-much-caffeine-in-coffee/
The discussion about smoking and gasoline reminds of this scene from the movie Zoolander.
Reminds me of the person asking what “Florida ounces” were, not too long ago. (fl oz, natch.)
Ha!