by James Hubbard, M.D., M.P.H.

Have you seen the headlines? “Caffeinated co-eds hear voices,” “Heavy coffee drinkers more likely to hallucinate,” “Too much coffee can make you hallucinate and sense dead people say sleep experts. The equivalent of just seven cups of instant coffee a day is enough to trigger the weird responses.”  That’s about three cups of regular coffee per day.

It came to my attention when health writer Brian Newsome posted in the health blog of The Gazette, our local paper, “Move over LSD and step aside shrooms—Here comes coffee.” To his credit Brian was skeptical and, in fact, wrote a follow-up post with a link to Dr. Ben Goldacre, who criticized the study’s quality at his well-known website badscience.net.  (Dr. Goldacre evaluates the quality details of medical news, holding author’s and media reporter’s feet to the fire to get it right.)

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by James Hubbard, M.D., M.P.H.

You can find interpretations all over the place about coffee’s and tea’s association (good or bad) with diseases such as cancer, blood pressure and heart disease. Recently, news has been favorable, especially when looking at overall deaths.

But most of us drink these beverages for the caffeine energy boost. Aside from the beverage itself, how much actual caffeine is too much?

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