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Food

A College Student Drank 60 Cups of Tea in One Week and Felt Terrible

Jessica Cole bought 1,200 teabags for the week and reported feeling downright terrible after replacing all beverages with piping hot caffeine and tannins.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US
Photo via Flickr user kurund jalmi

It's hardly a surprise that the British love tea. After all, opinions about the perfect way to make a cuppa are highly divisive, and you'd be hard-pressed to find an English person who doesn't make time for tea. But one university student has taken things a bit too far.

After all, tea's great. Many would argue that it's both a cultural and dietary necessity. But that doesn't mean you have to buy 1,200 bags of it and make it your sole beverage for seven straight days.

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READ: You've Been Making Tea the Wrong Way for 30 Years

According to The Independent, third-year psychology student Jessica Cole of Lincoln University decided to use herself as a human guinea pig for tea-drinking hysteria, downing roughly 60 cups in a single week (and hopefully not wasting the other 1,140). Would her eyes be opened to the wondrous effects of antioxidants and theanine, or would she fall into a k-hole of caffeine and creamer?

Well, unsurprisingly, she felt like shit by week's end. Cole reported feeling fatigued, queasy, and "sluggish" after replacing water and all other refreshments with piping hot tannins.

Cole told UK newspaper The Mirror that she "missed water most of all, because it's third year I'm not drinking too much in the week."

"It was also becoming really boring having the same thing to drunk day in day out, I don't think I'd ever craved a simple glass of water more in my life," she continued.

A European Food Safety Authority report from earlier this year found that roughly a third of the EU's working population are putting their health at risk by drinking too much coffee and tea. However, let it be noted that while too much tea could make you feel pretty horrible—maybe even give you the shakes and a terrible bout of anxiety—you'd have to drink about 140 cups of coffee in a single day in order to be at risk of dying from a caffeine overdose. Double that if we're talking about cups of black tea, which has roughly half the caffeine content of coffee. And the longstanding rumor that heavy caffeine consumption can mess with your heart rhythm was recently disproved.

In fact, if you're young and healthy, you'd probably die of water poisoning before the caffeine itself had the chance to kill you.

READ: A Bad Cup of Tea Is Worse Than a Heart Attack

In fact, you can drink up to five cups of coffee each day while enjoying caffeine's health benefits, meaning that Cole's experiment, despite sounding gross, jittery, and dehydrating, was ill-conceived but not so over-the-top in the grand scheme of things.

As for Cole, perhaps she should remember that if you love something, you should set it free. Not drink 60 cups of it in a single week.