During lunch today my co-workers were making critical comments about one of my few remaining vices, Diet Pepsi. Other than the cost, I don’t see that Diet Pepsi can do much harm (even though some scary web sites, including the very subtilely named aspartamekills.com, talk about brain tumors, vision problems, birth defects, hairy palms [no, I just made that up], and the fact that “Michael J. Fox, who was spokesperson for Pepsi, has an old man’s disease (Parkinson’s Disease) at only 30 years old” [my God, even shilling for diet soda can harm you!]).
But, it turns out that there is something in Diet Pepsi that will kill you if taken in large quantities: caffeine! In fact, some enterprising person has developed a “death by caffeine” web site that allows you to calculate exactly how much of your favorite caffeinated drink it would take to kill you. My co-workers can relax — according to the site, given my weight, ” [i]t would take 331.77 cans of Diet Pepsi-Cola to put [me] down.”
Categories: Science