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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Even milk from the same dairy tastes radically different in plastic than paper.

I always hated plastic milk as a kid. Nobody else seemed to notice the difference though. I sometimes wonder if there’s only a small subset of the population that can notice it.

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Are you sure the difference is not in your head? Try to do a blind experiment. Ask someone to pour a glass of milk from plastic container and a another glass from paper container and see if you can tell which is which.

It’s entirely possible, most artificial sweeteners have a chemical taste to me and if I consume them it unsettles my stomach for a couple hours. My mother is the only other person I’ve encountered with the same condition. My father and brothers can’t tell the difference. I can ingest real sugar and corn syrup without issue, but they taste very different to me. I discovered sodas made with real sugar about ten years ago - wow - those mexican cokes are amazing, but costs twice as much.

When the "Mexican" coke started making a splash as "better than American", Coke tested it blind with taste testers and came to the conclusion that there was no perceptible difference, and that the glass bottle makes more difference than the cane sugar vs HFCS (The whole point of HFCS is to be formulated to contain the same amount of glucose and fructose as cane sugar). Many other folks then performed tests (of better or worse quality) and they tend to show the same results, either there was no difference or people somewhat randomly preferred the cane sugar or the HFCS. But Coke is still happy to sell people a product made with cane sugar at a big premium, because why not?

(I put "Mexican" in quotes above, because standard Coke sold in Mexico in the past 10 years or so is made with HFCS just like in the US. The bottled cane sugar Coke is only made as a specialty product.)

Come Passover, all Coke in the stores is cane sugar (so I'm told). I don't drink much Coke, and if you put two glasses in front of me, I'm pretty confident that I could tell you whether they're the same sweetener or different. I'll notice the switch at the beginning and end of Passover. Since I'm not Jewish, and since Passover moves around, I'll claim this is close enough to a blind test.

For my money the elusive perfect Coke comes from a soda fountain that's adjusted just so. Couldn't tell you what's different, but some just nail the perfect carbonation level and syrup ratio. When I find one, I usually have three or four in rapturous joy, because it'll be months before I find one again.

Yep, Passover Coke with cane sugar comes in 2L bottles with a yellow cap.

The opposite for me. I would drink the paper milk, but....

Dixie was a beer sold and made in Louisiana. Part of the process had them storing the beer in fresh barrels. It made the canned beer taste like it had been in milk cartons. Very unpleasant.

Some pthalates seem to be detectable to some subset of the population. Same chemicals that are estrogen-alike.

Why would milk containers have phthalates in them? All ours here in Australia are made with HDPE which doesn't need plasticisers.

Although I have read that apparently a fair proportion of milk in the US is made with equipment that uses PVC piping that leeches phthalates before it's even packaged...

It's similar in the US. I'd note that even the crystal clear (highly recyclable) plastic you see does not contain the phthalates you're looking for. There was a fad in the early 00s for using polycarbonate water bottles that probably contained BPA, but those were then (rightfully) banned. You can't even use BPA or ortho-phthalates in children's toys since they very likely put them in their tiny mouths.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1367856/

Plastics still need a plasticizer, so those BPA-free plastics simply use a chemical like BPA but not studied.

I don't know about PolyCarobonate, but for LDPE and HDPE (and PET) that sounds incorrect. Certainly, chemists are worried about much smaller amounts of contamination (ppb) than humans and they would definitely know (and measure) how much plasticizer was leaching from their bottles.

It appears to be almost none:

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/lab-pla...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#BPA_substitutes

I know there's wide variety in plastics. Be careful about cherry picking studies that show no harm, you can do it with lead if you really want. The situation isn't as dire, but I think the actual impact on animals is more up in the air than a brief survey of the literature suggests.

Perhaps, but none of the plastics we're discussing (other than PC) have BPA in them at detectable amounts.

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