Yes and no. At certain concentrations, many safe compounds become dangerous in humans.
Even at tiny doses, foods like peanuts may be safe for the vast majority yet lethal for a minority.
Given how devilishly heterogeneous the human race is, the ideal solution provides safety testing at the individual level, not the population level [0]. But this is years away until computational and biological breakthroughs arrive.
[0] Population level is a misnomer. FDA trial sizes below.
Phase 1: 20 to 100 people
Phase 2: up to several hundred people
Phase 3: 300 to 3,000 people
https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3...
On average coffee is good, but you are not the average man.
This is quite a low amount, i.e., we're frequently consuming it at a dose that is close to or higher than the dose where you see negative effects.
Also, I don't think most people drink more than 2 cups of coffee per day -- if I know someone who drinks more than 2 or 3 I'd think they have a problem.
It would need to be in powder form or concentrated in something far beyond natural levels of coffee/tea/matcha/etc.
The lowest example of a lethal dose I can find in the literature is 57mg/kg. Caffeine overdoses are so rare that we don't know the true distribution, but it's clearly not the case that millions people will die from a few coffees.
Your other comment calculated the lethal dose as *a gallon of espresso*. That's like 125 shots. That is not a remotely normal amount of coffee. It would take multiple people over an hour to make that much espresso for you.
(cc @dang, seeing this growing trend of people misunderstanding the missing reply button and evading the timer via edits, perhaps UI affordances could be developed to better introduce folks to the feature?)
Also, FWIW the LD50 can be calculated with censored populations (ie not all subjects have died.) Think about it: if I administer a dose that kills half but leaves the other half living, the LD50 remains unchanged even if I continue increasing the dosage until all have died (or not). LD50 does not require a complete set.
Similarly with caffeine content "can be". All kinds of variables like roasting time affect the dose But the semi-standardized dose for a cup of coffee is about 100mg. Related to your link, they are a much larger cup of coffee for comparison. If you normalize it to the standard coffee size, it comes to 100mg caffeine, so right in line with what would be expected.
(based on 36ml espresso having 110mg caffeine, LD50 caffeine is 150-200mg/kg)
Healthy kidneys work through around a litre of blood a minute, so my guess is that, ahem, "breaking the seal" would keep caffeine levels in check.
Are there other caffeine delivery mechanisms that differ? Of course, but that’s not what the OP asked. The question was about the toxicity of coffee. That’s why it’s not worth arguing when something like caffeine powder provides the majority of ODs. Likewise there’s going to be variation in toxicity between individuals but those numbers are intended to be generalizable numbers to a population.
Panera used to sell a drink that contained close to the FDA maximum recommended daily quantity of caffeine, and also allowed free refills. Several people died, and sales were halted after some wrongful death lawsuits.
This isn't to say that caffeine is dangerous. Danger isn't an intrinsic property of a substance but rather an emergent property of the context in which it is used. (This is why the schedules of the Controlled Substance Act are inherently stupid.)