British personal trainer dies after consuming caffeine equivalent to 200 coffees
A man in Wales has died after ingesting an amount of caffeine powder equivalent to 200 cups of coffee.
Tom Mansfield, 29, a personal trainer and father of two, died of caffeine toxicity in January 2021, officials confirmed last week, the BBC reported.
Mansfield was trying to weigh a dose of powder in the 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 began clutching his chest and said his heart was beating fast. After lying down, he started having foam in his mouth, the BBC reported. His wife, identified as Suzannah, called paramedics, who were unable to resuscitate him.
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A post-mortem examination showed he had caffeine levels of 392 milligrams per liter of blood, coroner John Gittins said. Caffeine levels would be 2-4 milligrams per liter for someone who drank one cup of coffee.
Dr. Donald Hensrud, associate professor of preventive medicine and nutrition at the Mayo Clinic, told USA TODAY, “Caffeine is metabolized at varying rates. Some people are fast metabolizers. Some people are poor metabolizers. the dose he consumed was so high that it didn’t matter.”
Dr. Deep Bhatt, clinical instructor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, told USA TODAY that “with caffeine, the recommendation of less than 400 milligrams per day is considered safe and even beneficial. That’s about four cups of coffee 8 ounces in a day.”
“And as you increase the doses more and more, you start to get side effects,” he said.
Bhatt advised against supplementing workout powders with caffeine and encouraged those who use caffeine powders to be “very careful” when reading directions and labels.
USA TODAY fact checkers have found that serious caffeine overdoses are extremely rare. It’s almost impossible to overdose with regular brewed coffee.
The FDA estimates a lethal dose of caffeine to be 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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