How Much Coffee is Safe?

The Food Standards Agency says there is no limit set for healthy individuals. They recommend a balance of drinks and a sensible, moderate approach to coffee-drinking.

Good. Can we now fire the government employees that have nothing better to do than worry about how much coffee we drink?

How much does it cost to advise common sense, well it depends on the government department.

Probably not...; but maybe they could get a Golden Fleece or Fickle Finger of Fate award.

Somebody should start up a Bureaucrap of the Year award for the most boneheaded ruling by a regulator or agency, open to the public to make nominations. There would be gazillions of candidates, and sure to be some great jokes.

i guess the moment you cannot sleep at night means that you drank too much!

The amount I drink is fine; it's that other guy that has the problem...

(Age res proprias tuas. = Mind your own business.)

I have been drinking about 15 to 20 cups of coffee per day for going on 40 years (with about an 8 year break when I was sailing- had to limit my intake since my boat was too small to carry enough coffee beans). No health problems. I (and others) have noticed that my personality has "mellowed" somewhat in recent years, but I ascribe that more to having found the appropriate life partner than to excessive consumption of coffee or other dietary considerations (although I find that my appropriate life partner insures that I eat more regularly these days than I was prone to in the past).

I do find that I get mild headaches if I do not get enough coffee, and that I find it difficult to sleep at night if I don't have that last cup of coffee just before bed...

I'm not really a heavy drinker (5-6 cups a day), but the only difference I see when brink too much is that urinate a lot more, no mood changes or anything during the day. At nights it is easier for me to fall sleep if a have a cup of coffee and better if a I pontiate the effects with a cigarrette.

We tend to think that caffeine is only present on coffee beans, when it is actually present on a lot of vegetables (fruits and herbs, tea for example); apples contain about five times the ammount of caffeine in a cup of coffee.

You can easily eat 10 apples in a day and the only mood change you'll see is in the others (you ate all of the apples !).

Maybe people base their fears of the so called "caffeine rush" in the millenary story of the goat that acted weird after eating wild coffee beans in middle east; but I think that the goat already had serius beavioral problems, and maybe a schizo-psycotic profile, who knows ! we would need to ask the Freud of the goats about that.

For now, grab your mug, have a coffee and a great day.

oops... there is actually no caffeine in apples.

Caffeic acid and derivatives are ubiquitous in the plant world including apples - this is not caffeine and has no stimulant effects.

Caffeine on the other hand occurs naturally in chocolate, tea, guarana and yerba mate, as well as coffee. It is also added to a lot of processed foods where it wouldn't ordinarily be found.

This caffeine content variation issue featured on the BBC this morning.

The variation was a factor of 6 in some of the samples taken, apparently.

The point that was being made was that consumers really have no way of telling how much caffeine they are actually ingesting and that any recommended limits are therefore empirical at best.

Caffeine withdrawal symptoms seem to be the major "health risk" for avid coffee drinkers. If a person has any health condition that precludes large caffeine intake then total abstinence is the only real way to ensure a truly predictable dosage.

I have drunk and continue to drink coffee with gay abandon. I have no related health issues after decades of toxic immersion.

For me, safe coffee consumption means not lifting more than 20kg of coffee at a time without a lifting aid.

It is not necessary to abandon our gay friends in order to know now much coffee we consume. Buy a large quantity of green organic beans (Columbian for me). Then simply roast, grind, and extract to order. Record the details, compare them to your daily log quota, and you won't have to do anything else.

Green Ethiopian Yaergacheff for me...........2nd crack, medium brown roast.......20lbs/4months

Panama Geisha for me. The rest of the world agrees with me. Unfortunately, at $250.00 a pound, I do not get to enjoy it very often...

I agree, the greater health risks come from not having caffeine. If I go more than 6-7 hours without caffeine I am sure to get a migrane, not to mention the personality disorder that lack of caffeine causes!

One of the main reasons that there is such a great variance in caffeine in the "morning" cup of joe is the roast. The darker the roast the less caffeine... try a light city roast for a jump start in the morning...that is after showering with your caffeinated soap.

The UK NHS website states "If you're pregnant, you should limit the amount of caffeine you have to no more than 200mg a day ...". (This is also mentioned in the BBC link in the OP).

The program I heard on the BBC (Radio 4) stated that up to 300mg of caffeine had been found in a single cup of espresso from (at least) one outlet.

This may not be a problem for thee or me, but a tired mum-to-be who has 2 or 3 cups a day as a pick-me-up could be endangering her baby-to-be.

I'm not generally given to "nannying", but I think there's a valid point of concern here.

.....then total abstinence is the only real way to ensure a truly predictable dosage.

Should be reasonably safe if you make it yourself. The only suggestion for differing strengths (on the program I heard) was the quantity of ground coffee used per cup.

"Should be reasonably safe if you make it yourself"...

Vodka and coffee are similar in this regard.

If they want to study something potentially dangerous, they should look into the energy drinks.

My introduction was an entire evening drinking Red Bull and vodka........................................................never again.

That stuff is like cardiac arrest in a can.

What did you expect?

Canned caffeine and vodka from an unknown source.... Make it all yourself next time.

I've always been okay with vodka......................there's something in those things besides caffeine.

That's for sure. There's an amino acid called taurine they are big on. And I don't know what else. On the smell and taste of the stuff I couldn't drink it.

Don't do it. I think I was talking in 5 languages simultaneously, and spent 2 days afterwards wondering if I should go to the emergency room..............seriously. Chest pains radiating down my left arm. Screw that!!!

Took a case of beer just to get myself settled down.

Almost all of the energy drinks also contain L-carnitine and guarana. Try the low or zero calorie ones. They taste much better and you won't get the sugar crash afterwards.

Mmmm. guarana! I like this stuff. PC put out a guarana knockoff of Mountain Dew, which I have much enjoyed. As a break from the coffee. But I must admit, I prefer sugar to its substitutes. I like my sugar buzz, and don't seem to be bothered by crashes.

The only predictable crash I've identified for me personally, is the eleventh hour crash. For some reason, hour eleven after waking is guaranteed to be a bust, no matter what schedule I followed during the day. If work is attempted in that hour, it not only goes badly, but a state of torpor sets in and persists for the rest of the evening, so that little or nothing is accomplished. However if hour eleven is devoted to R&R, it is often possible to get back to work and put in another productive four hour shift. (And this is the trouble with being an entrepreneur - - my boss is a slave driver!).

Do you remember Surge? Glow in the dark green, super caffeinated, super surgary soda pop... much better than Jolt... spent many a night cramming with a least a two liter by my side... often alternated with Bravo coffee (drunk simple for the caffeine obviously). Do they still make this stuff? Not that I have a caffeine problem of course!

Sad to say I never got to try this one.. but it's still available in Norway as "Urge". You might want to look around for Vault. It's hard to find such interesting stuff, here in the less cosmopolitan areas of Canada.

One time i tipped over a can of that stuff without knowing at the workshop i worked at that time, i came back and the chrome on a handle Key had dissolved that lay in the stuff, after that i never touched the stuff again.

Anyways i went to a Movie Marathon drinking some of those "energy" drinks full with caffeine , didn't help crappy film still made me fall asleep

I'll have to remember that one.........................dissolves chrome...........got it.

Might come in handy some day.

Any "safe" levels may depend on your occupation. For instance, how much should a brain surgeon be allowed before surgery.

I'd rather any medic guddling around in my head was wide awake - as long as they didn't have enough to get twitchy.

Just about everything in coffee is good for your health afaik. Caffeine is certainly addictive, but it is not as nasty as other addictive stuff. If you quit you'd be sleepy a couple of days, then it's over. You can then go back to getting a buzz from one cup instead of forty or four.

One thing I hate about travelling is being subjected to other people's concept of what is an acceptable coffee. Worst of all, something that not only tastes like crap, it has so little caffeine that you have to drink six cups of the putrid stuff to be half awake.

Here's an "excellent" coffee alternative.....

http://www.wakiethailand.com/testimonials_detail.php?ln=en&id=204

Tastes like medicine.