{mosimage}Starbucks Coffee has been called “Christian crack.” Evidenced by the number of professing Christians typically meeting there, it is surely the new ‘drug’ of choice among believers. On any given visit, you may encounter a group of friends gathered to talk, Christians meeting for discipleship, a loan agent doing paperwork with clientele, employers interviewing potential hires, an older couple reading the paper, and the occasional believer alone with coffee & the Bible. It is a great meeting place, and with the right equipment (like an iPod to tune out the loud talkers), it’s a great place to study too.

Now some naysayers (probably ex-Mormons) have decried the new trend as lethal. They say that all this coffee is bad for us. From your youth, you’ve probably heard that coffee will stunt your growth…but kill you? Is it possible??

Thanks to the internet, we can know for sure. (Cue trumpet sound, flashing lights and cheesy announcer voice.) Thanks to EnergyFiend.com, there is now a ‘Death by Caffeine’ Calculator. Use it figure out exactly how much coffee (or other caffeinated beverage) you’ll need to drink in one sitting before you meet the Maker (…not the barista, but God).

Here’s also a few interesting disclaimers from the EnergyFiend website:

• The lethal dose is based on the LD_50 for oral ingestion of caffeine, and a lot of studies report different numbers. The one I’m using is about 150mg/kg. If you were to get caffeine injected into your bloodstream, as little as 2 grams can kill a grown adult. LD_50 is a medical term to indicate the dose that kills 50% of the test
  subjects. I’m not sure how they figured it out for people…
• The number of cans/bottles/etc the calculator gives you assumes you can
  drink it all immediately, or one-after-another. Physical limitations
  mean that you probably can’t drink enough of anything to kill you, but
  you can certainly start freaking out, hallucinating, go into shock or
  seizure, all sorts of cool things. Many people have correctly pointed
  out that the liquid capacity, or sugar contents, or any number of other
  things would probably prevent you from ingesting that much caffeine.