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It Takes A LOT Of Caffeine To Kill You, But You Can Get There

The family of a South Carolina teen who collapsed and later died after consuming an excessive amount of caffeine is speaking out to warn others about the potential dangers of energy drinks and other stimulants.

On April 26, Davis Allen Cripe consumed a large Diet Mountain Dew, a cafe latte from McDonald’s and an energy drink in a span of two hours. He then collapsed at his Spring Hill High School and later died at Palmetto Health Baptist Parkridge Hospital. The Richland County Coroner said on Monday that the official cause of death was a “caffeine-induced cardiac event causing a probable arrhythmia.”

“Davis, like so many other kids and so many other people out there today, was doing something (he) thought was totally harmless, and that was ingesting lots of caffeine,” Coroner Gary Watts said in a news conference. “We lost Davis from a totally legal substance.”

Watts said Cripe was healthy and had no family history of a medical problem that could have been exacerbated by the high levels of caffeine in his system, according to USA Today.

Dr. Teo Mendez, an orthopedic surgeon at New York Orthopedics, told Fox News that part of the danger is not knowing exactly how much caffeine is in these energy drinks.

“When you start having these energy drinks there’s a wide variability in the amount of caffeine in them,” Mendez told Fox News. “For example a Red Bull Has 80 mg of caffeine, some of these other energy drinks that they call Red Line could have up to 500 mg of caffeine – so seven times as much.

He also warned on the other stimulants like guarana that are added to these drinks and contain twice the amount of caffeine as a coffee bean.

Watts said Cripe had a history of drinking caffeinated beverages but the family said it had not reached the levels of addiction.

“The purpose here today is not to slam Mountain Dew, not to slam café lattes, or energy drinks,” Watts said on Monday, according to NBC News. “But what we want to do is to make people understand that these drinks – this amount of caffeine, how it’s ingested, can have dire consequences. And that’s what happened in this case.”

Well, seeing as more people die from sugar overdose then caffeine overdose, I don’t think we’re going to be seeing any changes anytime soon.

Also, more than likely the kid had a medical problem that the family didn’t know about, because it never manifested.