Sweetened beverages, including no calorie, fall on the extreme end of the sweetness spectrum. If you consume such sweet things even in moderation, you are recalibrating your sense of sweetness.

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.