Coffee
According to Caffeine Informer, 154 shots of espresso is enough to kill the average person. (That’s calculated at a rate of 77mg of caffeine per shot, though studies have found the range of caffeine per shot can vary enormously.) That adds up to around 12 grams of caffeine — however, Jack James, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Caffeine Research, estimated in Popular Science that the deadly amount is a considerably lower 10g.
Water
If you drank that much coffee or Coke, you’d actually be more likely to die of water poisoning. Though your body is mostly made up of water, drinking too much of it really can kill you — too much H20 causes a condition called hyponetraemia (basically, all that water flushes the salt out of your body, and without life-giving salt, you die). Seven-and-a-half litres of water consumed in three hours was enough to kill California mum Jennifer Strange in 2007, when she guzzled it down during a radio contest called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii”. The actual deadly dose is estimated to be, on average, six litres.
Dark chocolate
Dark chocolate has a little over three times more theobromine than milk chocolate (and baking chocolate has even more than that), so chowing down on around nine 220g blocks of dark chocolate could feasibly be the end of you. (It’d certainly be the end of your dog — only a few squares of chocolate is enough to kill man’s best friend.)
Potatoes
According to one of the many books spun off from Stephen Fry’s (thoroughly researched) quiz show QI, “more than a kilogram of potatoes eaten at a single sitting would be certain death”. That’s about seven medium-size potatoes. The culprit is nicotine (or, depending on your source, solanine), which is found in all plants in the Solanaceae (or nightshades) family, which includes potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants and (of course) the tobacco plant. For the record: 10 cigarettes contain enough nicotine to kill you, if you ate them raw.
Vodka
Alcohol has wildly different effects on people depending on factors like gender, body composition, metabolism, how much you’ve eaten and how fast the booze has been consumed. So take these figures with a grain whisky… er, of salt. But according to the Drug and Alcohol Clinical Advisory Service, an alcohol concentration of 4g per 100ml of blood (ie, a blood alcohol concentration of greater than 0.4) is enough to kill you. To reach that, a woman of average weight would need to drink 14 shots in around an hour; for a man, it’s as many as 20.