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Comment by dwaite | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this is to try to quantitatively match the stimulant effect of caffiene plus sugar/HFCS in the sweetened alternatives.

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Am I the only one that experiences sugar as a depressant? Eating high glycemic index foods makes me lethargic and sleepy. I've never experienced a "sugar high". I also don't have diabetes as my blood sugar level is within norm during routine physicals.

Maybe you just get the insulin spike that deals with excess sugar in the blood much sooner which I think is what is supposed to make you sleepy. Probably should consider yourself lucky :)

Yes, this happens to me too. I can get maybe a maximum 15-20 minutes of increased cognitive performance after ingestion. Once that is over I become lethargic and afterwards a bit irate since my concentration dips.

It bothers me that people like Warren Buffet can go along their day ingesting copious amounts of coke normal and sweets and still be a functional productive human being.

When I used to work at big tech, we had a candy buffet in the kitchen and unlimited ice cream. This definitely lowered my work performance.

I would probably not leave the buffet in order to maintain my high… thankfully in small tech I’ve only been offered access to water and coffee.

Did they sell diabetes solutions? “Eat your own dog food”…

There's a theory out there that since your intestines have 'taste buds' for sugar, that eating artificial sweetener ends up increasing your body's ability to scavenge sugars from your digestive tract.

It's one of the working theories for a causative link between obesity and consumption of diet soda. Which is usually swamped by the correlative link between the two.

I'm curious about this theory. Do you mean by eating the same amount of food, artificial sweetener makes your body more efficient and increases your food utilization rate? For example instead of 80% of calorie now 90% of food is being used by the body? Looks like a good way to save food, you can just eat less for more.

That sounds like insulin resistance, not diabetes.

It is probably just overload for you - I get the same thing after a big big meal or a lot of sugar. But a small amount is another story. If you drank the original size of coke (which I think was 8 ounces?) you might have another reaction!

The amount definitely has an effect, but its a linear function where lethargy increases proportional to sugar intake.

Had that for years. Then got diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Eliminating sugar is the number one thing that helps prevent flares for me.

Yeah same here. I feel like crap almost right away when I eat most anything with a decent amount of added sugars

Yep, me too! There is actually a link between high GI and sleepyness; orexin. It's a chemical messenger in the brain, and if you have very little of it, you have narcolepsy. If you have been injected or sprayed with a lot of it, you stay alert without sleep. Oh, and glucose inhibits orexin production!

My personal theory is that I have inherited a low base level of orexin, which makes me react with sleepyness to carbohydrates. I have no idea if this is accurate, though.

Maybe you could eliminate orexin as the cause if you ate a big meal and inhaled orexin, then noted if it lowered drowsiness (placebo affect aside)

Could potentially be reactive hypoglycemia:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expe...

It could occur even if fasting blood glucose is still at normal levels.

Do you have ADHD? That's the typical reaction to stimulants.

I wonder if Im the only person who is triggered by this widespread over-simplification? Relaxed and focussed is not drowsy. Also totally within the normal spectrum of amphetamine effects for anyone, regardless of diagnosis. I always see people parroting this idea. Oh you have ADD so _those drugs_ just make you sleepy yeah? Id be bouncing off the walls, they'd say.

There is the well-known "sugar crash" but it sounds like you basically start the crash without any of the energy boost.

Sugar, despite popular belief, is not a stimulant (I’d have to pull up my Intro Psych textbook to find the citations on this, but it’s been deeply studied).

Similarly, it doesn't make kids hyper. That's probably just a side effect of the environment in which kids typically get candy. There was a study, but I don't know what it was called.

Coke Zero, on the other hand, has the same amount of caffeine as regular Coke, which makes me doubt this hypothesis.

Alternately, the artificial sweetener might end up being too sweet, so they balance it out with some more bitter caffine.

My guess would've been the appetite suppressant qualities of caffeine.

Why would they do that instead of putting in less sweetener?

balancing out the acid maybe?

This is like the Three Body Problem, but with recipe ingredients!

I drink a lot of caffeine free diet coke now that I've developed a caffeine intolerance, and I think you're right. It doesn't have the bite without the caffeine and tastes kind of flat.

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