Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]
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Noted short-seller and equity valuation skeptic Jim Chanos once described the TAM of space companies as infinite, because space itself is infinite. This pessimistic take anchors our low-end fair value estimate of PEP to $infinity / share. Since PEP currently trades at around $170 / share, we believe there is considerable upside to the long term buy and hold investor.
It looks like lots was going on at the Arnell group at this time. In this article it even quotes Arnell as saying this work for Pepsi in OP as "Bullshit"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-the-firing-of-weird-design-...
You can't make this stuff up
> February 2009: Arnell sold Pepsi a pretentious, mostly made-up brand ideology document linking Pepsi to the Mona Lisa, De[s]cartes and Hinduism, as part of a successful logo redesign. Price: $1 million, reportedly.
https://www.fastcompany.com/1661802/the-secret-to-peter-arne...
I'm inspired by Jello Biafra's H2K2 keynote where he brought along a vinyl record of corporate training songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foFCd5xOrh0
Check it out @ 2:11:28 ; the crowd goes wild for Pepsi:
"Out there It's a Pepsi universe Thriving since time began
On a steady course At a steady pace Bringing pleasure everywhere All through time and space
And up here In the Pepsi enterprise We have one perfect plan: To bring Pepsi refreshment to all constellations
And if anyone can succeed We know we can It's all there on history's pages One refreshment through the ages
[Spoken] Pepsi is the universal refreshment, but has it always been that way, Professor? [Spoken] As far as I can remember.
We're proud that the Pepsi enterprise Never, ever stands still 'Cause the company's working Side by side with our bottlers And if anyone can succeed We know we WILL! "
Edit: Upon further reading about the guy who's behind this, Peter Arnell, it turns out he's possibly the harvey weinstein of the marketing business[^1]. It's a huge shame that neither this pseudointellectual bullshit, nor his string of workplace abuses, ruined his career. A consolation is that in 2011 his company got bought out and he got sacked.
[^1]: The Newsweek article is a good read here: https://www.newsweek.com/crazy-genius-brand-guru-peter-arnel.... There's also a Gawker piece that gives a pretty clear idea of how big of a piece of shit this guy is if you can stand the fact that it's Gawker: https://www.gawker.com/244608/new-yorks-worst-bosses-peter-a...
Did the author of this article ever try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far enough to hit the guy behind you. I guess this is what happens when you report exclusively on gossip.
Did he smash the CD or the CD player? What was "it"?
We once tried to bend a CD. It took a fair amount of effort but the opposite outer edges almost touched. Lots of small cracks appeared and there was ominous creaking… When pushed a little further, I think the edges did touch first, but for a fraction of a second before ¡CRACK!, the disk did shatter - there were two large parts (the outer quarters by width, approximately) remaining, a few other chunks, and the rest was a cloud of small parts liberally sprayed around the room. We were finding them for months afterwards, and some were sharply pointed. Even without a sharp point such a fragment would cause significant irritation if in contact with the eye just like any large particulate, and I certainly wouldn't want bits hitting the eye at the speed they must have been moving to spread as far as they did.
While the smashing-CD-on-the-table is very obviously apocryphal, perhaps holding one side on the edge of the desk and impacting the other with significant momentum (with a hammer?), or perhaps wedging it in place & kicking, could result in a snap what would also spray matter like this?
Also, if that sentence is meaning he smashed the CD player on the desk rather than the disk then I can certainly imagine small parts flying around, if only bits from the plastic casing.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-the-firing-of-weird-design-...
Bullshit. You'd be in a permanent sugar rush until your pancreas went on fire.
My ex had a few excessive habits when she was 21, but one was eating lots of carrots (like a bag a day?) and her palms turned a distinct orange.
Humans occasionally turn permanently blue by being pranked into eating colloidal silver.
That's a tall order. How about I just take your word for it?
And how is that site still I existence?
Since Weinstein was mentioned, I have to admit I read Gawker and therefore was not surprised when hearing the allegations against him in the broader media because Gawker had been writing about him for years. They made some big, obviously embarrassing decisions (especially Denton’s stance on outing people), but imo got it right much more often than they got things wrong.
https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
The vast majority of this strategy document is ridiculous drivel, written to sound profound but conveying no meaning. One early tipoff is the nonsensical timeline on page 6 -- it's basically just rattling off random bits of art history with no relation to the brand or the proposed strategy.
The result is that a lot of creative and talented people are putting out some beautiful, powerful, and entertaining works which are ultimately used to lie and to psychologically manipulate the masses in order to shape their views and extract money from them.
How many more artists could be paid and paid more by cutting out the bullshit merchants both inside and outside companies?
Most of the time modernizing the logotypes and fonts to make them simpler does not work, but here someone came with a coherent strategy that simply looks good and is distinct enough.
https://medium.com/look-and-logo/a-closer-look-at-the-premie...
Reddit's new design went heavy on modern/JS styling and not the raw simple HN-style text-heavy interface. They should have focused on loading the links->comments, pictures, video as quick as possible. They got the comments page to load async but video is broken and RES plugin does inline image/video loading way better. Everything else is a step back or sideways.
The one thing I think the new design had right was the lighter green for the type. That’s about it.
Replacing the horizontal convex "Tropicana" with the straight vertical and using a more serious font, was another blunder.
You guessed it. Arnell Group that did the new Pepsi logo.
"The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.
“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.
“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”
Full article about the botched campaign: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.ht...
My guess is that other recent brand redesigns to this boring, same, sans-serif minimalist aesthetic (recent HN article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506) are just as bad, but with "stickier" products (people aren't likely to leave Google or Facebook just because the typography is shittier) the downside is less noticeable.
The truth is that the guy behind this design agency is not a good designer at all and his career seems to have been driven by confidence, greed and the incompetence of his clients. It's a sample of one. He's the Jimmy Saville of bad design
I agree, I think this designer is just a particularly shitty designer, but he's a shitty designer that's just copying the broader trend of minimalist design laziness. I think the last section in that linked HN article (https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...) perfectly points out what went wrong in the Tropicana redesign as well:
> There’s nothing bad in wanting your logo to look simpler, better, mobile-ready, or universal enough to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
> But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Shoot for simplicity and legibility, but keep your distinguishing features. Don’t throw away what the brand has been working on for decades.
> Otherwise, you may end up in a situation where you could slap any logo on any product and hardly anyone would notice a difference:
Their packaging was absolutely genius because it instantly stood out on every shelf.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Da0flNiWkAAUda7.jpg
Other than the font it seems like everyone wants to got that way, of course if you move with the crowd you can't stand out from it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming “Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products or concepts they represent[...]”
if you were running a multi-billion dollar sugar water company whose main moat is the brand, and spent hundreds of millions on ads each year as one of the key line items in the budget, you too would want this level of sophistication and thought put into a brand refresh. Probably even more.
And you can imagine that this document was debated for weeks or months by the highest level executives as well as whole departments of marketers. They probably had multiple documents like this from multiple agencies. With that level of internal debate, all the granular side-by-side process diagrams are a necessary part of the UX here, to guide along the audience that only sees the pdf and can't talk to the agency designers.
It's just that the effort is making something completely ridiculous
It’s interesting to contrast this with the same company that had the awareness to recognize that basically no one ever types out “Mountain Dew” in its entirety and adopted the _de facto_ name it had acquired in the new millennium: mtn dew.
I agree though that the HN crowd as a CEO would want lots of effort to study how to make the most recognizable and liked brand.
Regardless of the excessive & laughable b.s. factor of this high level design concept document, the proposal meets its brief: design a rebranding strategy that can be used in 2d, 3d, kiosks, blah, etc. as required, without each needing their own design proposal.
So this designer latched onto geometric features of original pepsi logos, extracted some pattern, adjusted the sizing using golden ratio (thus the art history tour), and then went on to apply it to various use cases.
So maybe the design sucks, or possibly you can think of a more sophisticated approach to providing what is effectively a meta-design for a product suite, but this fairly simple approach that is proposed can in fact satisfy the design brief, in a fairly simple manner. Simple is good, right?
I think we can all agree this PDF goes out of its way to convince the reader that it's anything but simple.
- Pepsi DNA
- Pepsi Energy Fields
- The Pepsi Universe
It's all gold, to be honest. I love this document.
A million(s?) dollar study for a global brand is justified by things like:
* Research to see if the brand logos/names are misunderstood or offensive for a particular market/culture.
* Research regarding brand recognition before/after the proposed changes.
* A lot of design/thought behind how the brand will look in the many communication channels/products that it owns.
Second of all, do you actually think anyone who reads this document will associate positive feelings with Pepsi?
All it's making me think is "Man, those Coke ads with the polar bears were pretty cool."
These things are done for the execs not consumers. Same goes for Tropicana.
Can verify this is highly important. E.g. using the letters 'Af' as a prefix for a product marketed in Africa. Turns out that is a very offensive word.
Everything you see here is NOT sophistication. It has no science it's just an illusion.
The use of geometry and technical jargon gives the illusion of legitimacy however this stuff is no more legit then the word 'science' in 'scientology'. Which means that exactly like scientology, the content is illegitimate but borrows vocabulary from legitimate fields like "science" to make it seem real.
The use of analogies like DNA help people form connections with irrelevant things and these analogies don't actually communicate any new information. They serve to create a feeling of catharsis when you realize that there is a connection, but the connection is actually worthless. You learn nothing new.
Take the analogy: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." The quote is worthless. You already know life is random. You already know chocolate boxes are random. A comparison is made and a new connection is formed in your brain. But is there actually any new information here? No. It's a trick to make you think the quote is profound when it is really a bunch of mundane stuff you already know.
You've been bamboozled, along with every exec that fell for this report. Possibly the person who wrote this report tricked himself as well.
(And though I have absolutely no idea, one might suspect that modern boxes of supermarket chocolate are assembled by machine and all contain a constant, predetermined number of each type.)
The quote was made famous by an old US movie starring Tom Hanks. The movie is called Forrest Gump. Fittingly, the character who said that quote is mentally challenged.
I can laugh at this as agency nonsense with the rest of the crowd, and I think some of it may be warranted. But, it is still ultimately how business works insofar as brand matters, small tweaks to brand can have huge ripple effects; mightily so when the product is the brand, and disregarding anything brand or marketing related is foolhardy.
Most of my BFA is in graphic design and it's not my only art and design education, so I'm pretty well-versed in artsy fartsy Bauhausian high-concept visual communication. From the very first days as a Freshmen you start with exercises like finding as many ways as you can to create a palpable sense of tension with only two black squares on a white background by changing the scale and placement, or making two identically colored swatches look like two different colors by placing them on a field of a different color. Professors deliberately don't give you a set guidelines in these exercises because the artistic roots of design don't work that way— you have to understand the way visual components work together on a visceral level before you can effectively reason about them... even pretty straightforward things like effectively setting paragraphs of text or kerning letters can be pretty nebulous, and that's much more straightforward than at abstract logo design.
Could you imagine the pressure of being the art director wielding those nebulous and subjective processes revamp a worldwide household name in one of the most image-focused markets to ever exist? Or being the executive with zero domain knowledge tasked with evaluating the work of this firm? And while the early parts of the process can be subjective, there are vastly more wrong answers than right ones when it comes time to reveal your final product.
This tension means selling your vision is just as much a part of the design process as creating it, and that's a tough job. Check out this 27 minute long pitch film legendary designer Saul Bass made to sell his rebranding of Ma Bell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI
That was a huge initiative and it required a lot of explanation— not just explanation of individual decisions and the reasoning behind them, but explaining how he saw the context of the company, all its individual parts, and how people perceived them before deciding how he was going to affect the changes he was hired to affect. But it's all very, very digestible because he's a designer and that's what designers do. They figure out how to take complex or nebulous ideas and concepts and efficiently and effectively communicate them (usually) visually.
And while some of this breathless report makes good sense, much is far from digestible. Parts of it brought to mind this famous Francis Ford Coppola quote:
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."
It dabbles in bits of knowledge most folks would consider obscure, presents not-obviously-useful conclusions based on them and then wraps the whole burrito up in a cloak of grandiosity. I mean, when someone places the theoretical framework of a corporate identity revamp on a timeline with some of humanity's most significant achievements, you better strap on your bullshit-proof vest. It seems more designed to make readers feel insecure about not connecting the dots (or maybe zillions of circles) and therefore less likely to confidently push back. I'm really not sure how else the assertion that a circle trisected by two very deliberately placed, but relatively straightforward lines could even subconsciously conceptually intersect with the earth's magnetic field. 90% of that study of perimeter oscillations was psuedo-analytical pointless bullshit.
This sort of thing annoys the hell out of me because it reinforces the view of design as entirely subjective fluff propped up with bullshit when most professional design is actually pretty well reasoned.
1. A link is posted to HN whose content can easily be made fun of, because it appears bizarre without context.
2. People on HN jump at the opportunity to make fun of said link so they have something to take a dump on. It’s a wonderful ego-trip. They cannot get enough of it. Most of those who do not need the ego-trip to feel better about themselves usually move along without comment.
3. Comments like yours which are trying to be curious instead of mocking are “raining on their party”, i.e., ruining their ego-trip.
4. Instead of engaging with you on a level of thoughtful discussion, i.e., “let’s explore why such a bizarre document exists instead of just mocking it because there is nothing to be gained by doing that”, such commenters are more than happy to take a dump on your comment too.
Instead of engaging with your comment in its entirety, they will nit pick on the fact that your comment features the word “sophisticated” and base their entire response on that. Anything to keep the ego-trip and judgement going.
Now granted, there’s a lot of ignorance, also in this thread, as to why companies develop elaborate philosophies behind their brands to an extent which seems far-fetched for the average person. But it’s also true that in the marketing field, especially on the higher levels, it’s really easy to start bullshitting. And this document is not only a great example of this, it’s an example dialed up to 11.
I agree with you that content which is presented “to be laughed at” inherently spawns some degree of non-productive, toxic discussion. But I also believe that we should never not call out bullshit when we see it.
Yes "sophistication, data-science, a/b testing, consumer science(the real type)". None of that is in the pdf.
Consumer research existed long before IT started A/B testing everything.
Typical Light Path > Typical Shopping Aisle
Light Path with Gravitational Pull > Gravitational Pull of Pepsi
Relativity of Space and Time > Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
My only take away from this post is that I like the 1962 skeuomorphic Pepsi logo with the bottlecap.
So I guess this is the "progress" we can offer to humanity, pretty pictures and shapes with psychological tricks for corporate speculation and self-validation.
Also known as “the circle”.
Credit where credit is due, it takes confidence to make this kind of pitch with a straight face.
Story time...
This one time, I was reviewing a design with a client. We were going through this new page design in Figma. In the Zoom meeting, there were people from Marketing (SEO, Social, etc.), Legal, Product managers, developers, and a bunch more of which I don't even know why they joined the meeting.
What happens during those types of meetings is that someone, usually the person highest in rank, puts the following words on the table: "so what do you guys think, thoughts?".
That's where things start to get messy...
In a large corp, when the boss puts that question on the table, people start to feel itchy. They want to say something clever and impress the rest of the team. Automatically their starting point is: this design isn't good and needs my clever input, so I can impress the boss and put my stamp on the project.
The design that was basically approved by the same stakeholders over email, suddenly was getting 'feedback' from left and right.
'Make the font bigger'
'Make the font smaller'
'I don't like the shadows here'
'I really like how Competitor X, does it, can we do something exactly like that'.
I tried pushing back, but it was too late. I was getting swamped in seemingly clever input from people that were just trying to impress the next person.
We went back and designed 2 pages, one we thought was right, and the other one based on all the feedback that people were sharing.
Their CEO went with option 1 luckily, but it wasted a ton of time for no good reason.
Just looking at the PDF, I can imagine the conversations that lead to that 'design strategy'. Large design agencies know how to play this game, don't really care about great design and usually employ great story tellers to sell the idea to clients for big bucks.
That said, there's often a component of competitive commentary, but also consider Parkinson's Law of Triviality, a/k/a Bikeshedding:
It's a loan word from Spanish meaning "little war".
Can anyone tell me if there is even an iota of meaning in the design process?
This Pepsi rebrand farce feels more like The Emperor's New Clothes. My guess, and someone with more knowledge can absolutely correct me, is that whatever agency bid for the job, they knew they were basically milking Pepsi for every penny they could, and it was pure greed. And in order to justify the utterly exorbitant estimate, they pulled so much bullshit out of their asses hoping to completely overwhelm the clients and utterly baffle and confuse them and make them feel too stupid to even ask about anything.
Basically, design process should make sense and be understandable to the average empathetic, intelligent business owners.
When done right, the process should make sense to a layperson
The head of the design firm cautioned our CEO: "If we do this right, the result will not be mindblowing to you. In fact, your reaction might be 'duh - that's really obvious.' Because you already know who you are."
(paraphrased)
I really liked that sentiment. I thought that company did a great job, both on the brand identity itself and on the communication.
“It looks nice” doesn’t play all that well, and doesn’t give you much protection from a decision maker who (incorrectly) says “I think my idea looks nicer”.
This is not representative of all design experiences though, I’m sure.
When an engineer does it for the design of rollercoasters or boats, it gets praised.
https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/2ndyearidlab/author/hohsuan/page/2/
I see little difference of concepts used for the 'fair curve' and those of designing a bottle.
I left wondering if I was the only one that noticed they'd said and shown nothing at all.
When this was "leaked" it was discussed for weeks, and you can see it is still discussed more than ten years after the fact.
It's probably been more effective than most of the ad campaigns I can remember.
I had seen it before (maybe here in HN), but I was convinced that it was a prank.
Can anyone confirm the authenticity of this ?
The document is almost unbelievably over-the-top. I think that it must be an intentional parody of marketing-speak. If you think that it's not, can you offer any evidence in support of your view?
I wonder if your comment exemplifies some corollary to Poe's Law - that someone mistaking real for parody or vice versa will confidently assert their view as obviously correct and challenge others (even if they constitute a seemingly informed majority) to justify their own.
I wonder what was created first - the agency creating the new logo (and then backing into the justification for it), or did the justification for it actually come first & that lead the agency down the path to how the logo was ultimately created.
Symbolism is all around, in logos, advertising, architecture, etc. Personally I see too many modern designs, even art, merely being 'visually appealing' or 'fashionable', without any reasoning, coherence, references, or anything behind them.
Just use common sense and first principles and you can make a logo. Make sure it doesn’t look like a you-know-what and you’re golden.
Thought experiment: can a logo that heavily uses the Golden Ratio actually look bad? It could be the ultimate 'design for dummies' hack.
I'll expose my ignorance here though and say that to this unenlightened, it looks like conjured up bullshit ..
To me, it looks like the fat belly you’re going to end up with if you drink too much Pepsi.
"Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity." story of my life.
C'mon man!
The "cause of death" noted for these cases never mentions metabolic syndrome (variously, fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, processed-food disease), but rather secondary illnesses it drives, most notably high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and circulatory illness. Most of these are products of high uric acid level, itself a byproduct of fructose processing in the liver. Fructose is processed only in the liver, like other toxins, and most similarly to alcohol.
The standard to diagnose high uric acid has risen sharply in recent decades as levels themselves have risen with sugar intake, so people with a deadly uric acid level do not learn of the core problem. They instead are told of the high blood pressure and diabetes, and get medication for that, masking it but not its harms.
We should not be allowing sale of these products; or at least, labels should warn of their fructose content. We could start seeing "contains no fructose!" on packaging, instead of "non-fat". (Because fat, even saturated fat, it now turns out, is harmless.)
(Fructose in normal food, particularly fruit, comes with enough fiber to divert most of the fructose to your gut bacteria. Juice and soda strip away this protection.)
Eventually, I made great changes to what I was eating and I began to weigh everything that I ate, to ensure that I eat no more than planned, and in somewhat less than a year I have lost one third of my previous weight, reaching a normal value.
Previously, I have not been drinking much Pepsi Cola or Coca Cola, but I have been drinking a lot of various fruit juices, all of which contain excessive amounts of sugar.
By far the most effective change in my eating habits, leading to weight loss and better health, has been to stop drinking any other kind of beverage except water and herbal teas without sugar.
Grapes, almost uniquely among fruits, have practically no fiber, so are as bad as juice.
The glucose part of sugar is mostly harmless. So we focus on the fructose.
That's a very unsubstantiated claim. I'm not debating the association of hyperuricemia with metabolic syndrome or cardiovascular risk factors, but I don't think we have much evidence to establish a causal link between hyperuricemia and all the morbidities listed.
> Have to be, to do it at all.
Lol. Yeah bud, I have a ton of friends that are endocrinologists, all mostly great and intelligent folks, but I’m not letting them touch me with a colonoscope - or pretty much any implement. It’s not exactly a field for the procedurally inclined.
Be sure to report back what they tell you.
Most likely they don't actually know any endocrinologists, or were told that in fact uric acid is known to be the connection between fructose metabolism / fatty liver and metabolic syndrome illnesses.
Some people just feel compelled to jump up and defend sugar anytime it is blamed for illness.
Ironic since you are the one making the claim and have not produced any references. I can’t prove they don’t exist but you could easily counter if one did.
Furthermore I linked to one peer reviewed review article, again https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4078442/
that is chock full of balanced references if anyone is so inclined to peruse them and takes a critical examination at the various publications and the arguments can be evaluated solely on merits alone. There is continued research in this area but so far no smoking gun as to causality.
There are no meta-analyses I know of on your specific claim as there is a lack of primary research in human subjects to even substantiate it.
> Most likely they don't actually know any endocrinologists
I’m a practicing academic internist. I know endocrinologists both personally and professionally. This is absolutely irrelevant though as the literature is available for you.
> Some people just feel compelled to jump up and defend sugar
I did nothing of the sort. I treat diabetes and hyperlipidemia on the daily - that would be ridiculous.
Edit: oh and I missed your edit - a reference to Perlmutter? A celebrity neurologist who has widely been debunked for making wildly unsubstantiated claims. You are not arguing in good faith. You have the entirety of PubMed and Google scholar on which to reference peer reviewed literature - some of it is also crap - but you aren’t even doing that - you are sticking to the lowest quality unsubstantiated celebrity bilge.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDJsxw0uMLM
Perlmutter:
And Lustig is well known, he's on the border of being a crackpot, unfortunately. Mehmet Oz is a professor emeritus of Columbia, and contributed some amazing shit to the field of cardiology, but now he is undoubtedly a crackpot, so just having some credentials and even a good history is not an automatic pass to get out of presenting high-quality scientific methods.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822166/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4078442/
And.. this is not the first time this has come up here even: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15760599
Not really. Fructose is JUST fructose, sucrose is half fructose.
EDIT: nevermind, assumed the rest was sucrose rather than glucose
In soda, the ingredients say sugar, but it has already been dissociated to fructose and glucose in the bottle.
"High fructose corn syrup" is the same as table sugar, to your body.
And sure, drinking enough sugar will result in obesity, but so will eating too much carbs or fat.
Pakistan has as much metabolic syndrome as other former UK colonies, but remarkably little obesity.
Metabolic syndrome is a product of excess fructose in the bloodstream, itself a product of sugar consumed without enough accompanying fiber. Beverages are a particularly concentrated source, but other stuff packaged as food can be as bad.
40% of the non obese adult population in the US? More BS dude.
It should be easy to point to some relatively reputable public health agency or peer reviewed publication where this is substantiated.
Among non overweight individuals I’m going to peg it more around 5%.
Some people say artificial sweeteners have bad effects on your insulin metabolism because your body reacts to the taste as if a slug of sugar is on its way. But it must be complicated by conditioning; seems like after years of drinking it, the association would weaken.
I don't know of any reliable results on that.