A Mayo Clinic article said that you shouldn’t have over 400 mg of caffeine a day. The FDA says if drink more than 400 mg, you can get: insomnia, jitters, anxiousness, fast heart rate, upset stomach, nausea, headache, a feeling of unhappiness (dysphoria).
Yipes! That’s quite a list of things you don’t want.
How much caffeine does your coffee have?
For the past few months, I got back onto the caffeine truck. The coffee has really boosted my creativity and production. But am I drinking too much? Every day I make one 14-ounce cup of Nescafe Taster’s Choice. Sometimes I wonder if I should make a second cup.
There are 98mg of caffeine in one 8-ounce cup of Tasters Choice. But what is that in my 14 ounces? Punching in “(98/8)*14=” into Google’s calculator results in 171.5mg. Phew. That’s under the 400mg limit. I’m safe. This confirms that I probably shouldn’t be making a second cup. That took some research on my part to find the answer. It shouldn’t have to be that hard.
Idea: the Coffee Caffeine Calculator
It would be fun to make an online “Coffee Calculator”
- Select your brand of coffee
- How big is your cup/mug?
- How many cups/mugs you drink in one day.
- Then it tells how you many mg of caffeine you are consuming. There might be a fun needle diagram that shows are close you are to the maximum of 400 mg—or how far past you are the max.
The coffeeinformer.com comes pretty close to this. They have a detailed listing of all the coffee brands, along with the standard cup sizes. You just have to look through a table of data. (with the calculator idea, it would just be fields that you fill in)
Update: coffeeinformer.com does have a calculator!
It has a pretty cool name. Coffee Overdose Calculator: How much is too much? They include some slick features, like asking how much you weigh, your level of caffeine sensitivity. (does anyone know their sensitivity range?) Then it spits out the maximum number of 8-ounce cups you can have in day.
Personally, I’d rather enter the size of my mug. When I see “you can drink five cups a day”, I IMMEDIATELY get excited, and think I can have FIVE of MY mugs a day. But my mug holds 14 ounces, not the standard 8 ounces.
Nonetheless, this is still a really cool tool. I’m glad someone else did all the work putting this together, so I can cross this off my list of projects.