One Gut Wonder

I found this video tooling through youtube and thought back on it. I've seen other videos of people attempting nefarious food based challenges such as the gallon of milk in an hour challenge, or the tablespoon of cinnamon challenge. Apparently the people that attempt these believe they are the .001% of all humans on earth that can actually pull this off. Without going into serious explaination of biology on how these feats cannot be done, I can tell you that from an eyewitness account, the after effects are not worth the possible glory you might obtain by doing them.

A military challenge we all tried (when we were bored, which was quite a bit in the field) was the 2 MRE crackers in 2 minutes , which in this post, the Marine actually pulls it off. While not impossible and no harm will likely come to the body, it's still harder then hell because the crackers are dry as sand.

Back to the video at the top however. This guy seems a bit more sane then the other (search youtube for "100 cups of coffee"), as the other guy attempted it in 8 hours using a French press (really dumb because that coffee has more caffine). I am, although, not going to stick up for this doofus either.

*BIOLOGY TIME! YAY!*

The average cup of coffee (8 oz.) typically contains 86 mg of caffine provided it is drip coffee and not French Press. This man is attempting to drink 100 cups of coffee in 24 hours. Let's look at this caffine guy in depth.

The lethal dose of caffine for a human is anywhere from 3-20 grams. The duration of caffine in the body lasts between 1.5-5 hours depending obviously on age, body weight, and metabolism. A lethal dose of caffine effective causes a heart attack, and in some extreme cases of too much stimulants, literally rips the heart itself apart from beating too hard. This is why the cases of people actually taking whole bottles of No-Doz, then falling over dead, is not a mystery.

So, his challenge is to ingest 8.6 grams of caffine within a 24 hour period. To do so, he would not be able to drink more then 4 cups every hour, and this is barring any sleep. However, this is also stating that his body could tolerate this dosage, as the low end of lethal is 3 grams of caffine.

So in short, all this being said, impressionable youtube kids everywhere, I wouldn't suggest this one. Even as I am an AVID supporter of caffine, the idea of my very core exploding doesn't really strike me as being worth so many seconds of fame (nor is the idea of puking up a gallon of milk).