Is wireheading bad? Maybe, but if I'm going to be doing it either way I'd rather reduce the harm.
[1] https://www.uchealth.com/articles/sweeteners-headaches-and-t...
https://www.marketingweek.com/diet-coke-sales-overtake- classic-coca-cola/
"Compare this to the week before, when Diet Coke sales were at £10.4m and classic Coca-Cola £10.65m. The data shows Coca-Cola value sales were higher than Diet Coke every week for the past year until the brand overhaul and subsequent introduction of the sugar tax. Since then they have diverged with Diet Coke sales increasing at a faster rate than classic Coke." [2018]
Why not dial back on the sweetness? Is it really that addictive? Why not drink water rather than cans of genuine or artificial sugar water.
FUD, sure. Personally I am uneasy about tricking my body that it is getting sugar when it is not. I am not waiting for scientific evidence.
The hippies were right. Eat food. Mostly plants. As close to raw as practical and tasty. If your great grand mother would not recognise it, it is not food.
So first off, just about all of these artificial sweeteners are like 200x sweeter than sugar or higher. This kind of means that you have high amplification which comes with distortion—artificial sweeteners do not taste like the real thing. So those chemical aftertastes are probably the biggest contributors to skepticism.
Second, the most common artificial sweetener right now is aspartame, and it is kinda nasty stuff. Don't take my word for it, drink a Diet Coke that's about 1 week before expiration and see if you can stomach it—it's foul. That foulness is the metabolites of aspartame, I want to say one of them is formaldehyde? They are pretty nasty and you do produce them after drinking a Diet Coke, they appear in urine afterwards. The aspartame also bears a cryptic warning for people with phenylketonuria, and it might legit make consumers feel worse, as in reduce their serotonin and dopamine and make them more irritable.
The only silver lining on this cloud is that because this stuff is 200 times sweeter than sugar, you actually only get a very low dosage per each individual beverage. Because of that very low dosage, we are thankfully not seeing huge epidemiological problems from it yet. But yeah, a combination of nothing tasting right and the poster-child being awful is a decent recipe for conspiracy theories.
My suggestion is that for any food, read the ingredients! If you don't like Aspartame and won't trust anything made in a lab go with Stevia.
Aspartame may not be the only one but it's absolutely the most common. And it really isn't very shelf stable and it really does taste nasty when it decays. If that's “FuD” then you're at war with taste buds?
Diet Pepsi switched to sucralose and had to switch back. Diet Coke sells a sucralose version but it's not at all popular. There are a couple smaller markets for offbeat sodas sweetened with stevia, but like someone else mentioned, stevia is a hella acquired taste, very soapy.
Sucralose and allulose have virtually no taste other than sweet.
FWIW, in the last few years two new low-concentration sweeteners have grown a lot: erythritol and allulose. These tend to be tolerated gastrointestinally by more folks than traditional sugar alcohols. Erythritol is in some popular mass-produced food products like Vitamin Water Zero and Halo Top--it has a bit of a cooling sensation. Allulose tends to really just read 'sweet'. It's a little behind erythritol adoption, but I've started to see it in stores (Trader Joe's now carries it) and in random drinks (I've seen a couple smaller canned coldbrew coffees with it).
Look for an artificial sweetener with a glycemic index of 0. For example, stevia (made from plants), erythritol, or mannitol. Xylitol has an index of 7, others even higher.
That doesn't necessarily help. Saccharin, aspartame and acesulfame-K have all glycemic index of 0, but have been found to alter food preferences in humans.
cf. Roberts et al., Uncoupling sweet taste and calories: Comparison of the effects of glucose and three intense sweeteners on hunger and food intake, Physiology & Behavior 1988 https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-9384(88)90207-7
How do you figure? It's practically pure sucrose, just like table sugar.
So it wasn't as surprising for me to learn that there are suspicions that artificial sweeteners may alter gut biome.
There isn't any consensus yet, but my N==1 seems to agree with the suspicion. I am generally fairly sensitive to gut biome changes, even a few weeks on a different probiotics might change e.g. my sensitivity to milk.
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/10/5228
The fact that artificial sweeteners are used as animal feed additive in order to increase body mass should give you enough to think what happens if we add it randomly to human food.
Yes, artifical sweeteners can be a good replacement for sugar, but things that shouldn't contain sugar in the first place should probably not contain artificial sweeteners either.
But weirdly it somehow depends on the ratio of the ingredients. Some brands I can handle, others I can never partake in (Pepsi MAX being the worst offender).