Everything in moderation.
If you only drink soda, you've got problems. If you only drink water, you're not having any fun.
It's OK to pick a point somewhere in the middle.
If you only drink soda, you've got problems. If you only drink water, you're not having any fun.
It's OK to pick a point somewhere in the middle.
Personally, I’ve avoided all added sugars and sweeteners for a few years now. I used to find apples bland and boring, but now they taste like indulgent candy. The same goes for pretty much all fruit. I can taste sweetness in vegetables that I used to find bitter. Lightly cooked carrots, beets, squash are all deliciously sweet treats. The bottom line is that I get a lot more enjoyment out of “healthy” foods now.
When I’ve recently tried “normal” sweets like cake or soda, they taste sickeningly sweet. However, I imagine that if I drank even a no calorie sweetened drink like Coke Zero “in moderation”, my sweetness scale would recalibrate and I would start gravitating more towards sweeter things, and be less able to sense the sweetness of mildly sweet things.
The same concept applies to other flavor profiles. Salty, umami, starchy, fatty. Eating processed foods even in moderation reduces your enjoyment of whole foods and consequently makes you less likely to eat them.
Moderation might not be fine for you. It seems to work for me.
ymmv, but some (many? most?) people are able to drink a can of diet soda a day and not totally abandon eating vegetables as a result.
That's a very strange thing to say...
It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing.
When I first switched to water only 7 years ago, it was actually hard because I'd had a lifetime of flavor overload, and it takes awhile for your sense of taste to adjust to normality. American food in general is over-salted, and over-flavored. Eating most things there is like a punch in the face after eating normal food again (England has the opposite problem).
Drinking carbonated water with a twist of lime helped a lot, and then after awhile I came to appreciate the subtle nuances between different water types. Tap water in San Francisco has a harsh overtone to it. Tap water in Western Oakland tastes a little muddy. Tap water in Vancouver and Leipzig is actually quite tasty. The best water I've ever had is hands down in the tiny town of Nagasasa in Japan. We actually dumped out all of our water bottles and brought 20 litres of the stuff back with us to Nagoya (where the tap water tastes terrible).
It's only in the last six generations that water has supplanted beer (typically "small beer") as a beverage. Prior to that it was a dangerous thing to drink water unless you lived far out in the countryside.
We also see much more recently that 3rd world countries didn't do this, either. People drank water.
Today the Czech Republic is the country with the highest beer consumption per capita, at 140 liters per person per year. Germany clocks in at 99, and the US is at 72. In the late middle ages, the average in Britain was 300 liters per person per year.
In 1830, Americans over the age of 15 consumed more than 31 liters of pure alcohol per year. If that was all in 7% beer, it corresponds to 1.2 liters of strong beer every day. Probably quite a bit was also in whiskey, which was cheaper than milk back then.
I have plenty of fun only drinking water thanks.