The price of ‘sugar free’: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There are more natural-derived sweeteners now available, although they may be heavily processed. Examples of natural-derived sweeteners: stevia, xylitol, inulin, erythritol, monk fruit extract.
The following paragraph from the article is sloppy:
> "A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege."
The linked study (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6...) does not mention stevia at all. The linked study refers to "sugar-sweetened beverages". But misleadingly the article author start with stevia (a natural-derived sweetener) then switches to the term "artificially sweetened" and links to the study. The reader is left the implication is that all sweeteners cause toothache.
Run a chemical analysis on several brands of natural sugars and your going to find stuff like sulphur dioxide used as a preservative and trace amounts of industrial lubricants etc.
Neither is extraction.
That's what really matters.
For example, cyanide is otherwise lethal but widely present in plants, so our bodies are actually pretty good at dealing with it.
So along that axis you could probably lump stevia and aspartame closer together, while sorbitol (which is very much naturally occurring) would be much closer to sucrose.
I can see why you might find it comforting but it’s really just a just so story. Evolution is really slow and needs significant pressure to result in adaptation, just look at how slowly humanity has been adapting to lactose.
Finding an obscure chemical that humans find sweet and then concentrating or manufacturing massive quantities of it isn’t inherently safe even if trace amounts of it are in some plant.
But it's not about being "comforting", it's about having a heuristic to make decisions when you don't have enough hard data. So in general, I try to avoid novel chemicals. It's not a guarantee of anything, but it's good enough for first-pass decision-making.
My youngest daughter is highly allergic to mold, and has to avoid most sour candy just in case because citric acid is grown in mold based bioreactors.
Isn't this the crux of the issue, that lacking clear predictive models of side-effects (short, mid, and long term) it is better to err on the side of caution with this heuristic. If we can definitively assert outcome, then yes, go with the science.
Also, disagreement regarding equating a cultural phenomena (demographics & earnings) with a biological one. This is an error which leads to false analogies and conclusions.
Also disagree about your disagreement on principle without a structurally valid argument.
In case you missed the link and discussion in the article, here you are:
Sugar isn't the only thing that causes tooth decay. Isn't it also the acids in the drink? I'd guess if you currently drink soda flavored with sugar and you're looking to reduce tooth decay, switching to water would be far more effective than switching to an artificially flavored soda.
No acid -> tooth decay has a harder time getting through enamel.
Acid, but no sugar -> enamel wears off and tooth decay will eventually get in unless you clean your teeth regularly and/or eat a very low sugar diet (keto-levels).
And that was the problem! The acid softened his enamel and the brushing removed it.
Colgate website says to wait 1hr after drinking orange juice, drink water in between, and/or use a toothpaste without sodium laurel sulphate
https://www.colgate.com/en-us/oral-health/brushing-and-floss...
The sugar alcohols are either near zero on the glycemic index or actually zero (erythritol). Many sugar alcohols like xylitol are natural and are found in small amounts in the food that we eat.
I don't understand why people still use these artificial chemical sugars, when the natural alternatives seem to have lots of health benefits.
Some sugar alcohols have antibacterial effects against tooth decay bacteria (e.g. there's some evidence for xylitol and erythritol against streptococci). Some sugar alcohols neither promote nor inhibit their growth (e.g. sorbitol, as far as I'm aware).
> I don't understand why people still use these artificial chemical sugars, when the natural alternatives seem to have lots of health benefits.
I'm guessing cost has something to do with it. Artificial non-nutritive sweeteners, being hundreds or thousands of times more potent than sugar, can be hundreds of times more expensive per gram than sugar alcohols and still be cheaper to use. Sugar alcohols aren't even as cheap per gram as sugar, nor as potent. I wish that weren't the case :/
(There is also, of course, the side effects of consuming too much. Most people could eat an abnormally large dose of artificial sweeteners without any major immediate gastrointestinal problems. When people eat too much sugar alcohols, they have the kind of problems that made Amazon reviews of sugar-free gummy bears famous...)
I'm sure neither is healthy, my teeth are browned from coffee, afterall. But I'll take acid over sugar 10/10 times.
> One problem with sweeteners in the diet of children, Sibson says, is that the more children consume them, the more they develop a sweet palate and therefore crave sweetness in all its forms, with or without sugar
Drinking sweet things gives you a sweet tooth! If we assume sweeteners are perfectly safe, wouldn't we still expect people who e.g. drink sweetened drinks instead of plain water to be more likely to gain weight overall, because they have a preference for sweet things and lots of sweet things have calories?
Personally I'm not worried about it: my high consumption of sweetened drinks has not stopped me losing weight by the conventional method of eating less. There is another ingredient in soda that's more problematic (caffeine can mess up your sleep, and if you sleep badly it's a lot easier to gain weight).
It took me about three weeks to get rid of the sugar habit, and now I only consume small amounts of sugar through an apple a day and protein powder in my morning porridge. I'm also back to water only. I figured I'd share in case it could help anyone else out there struggling with strong sugar cravings.
> I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities.
https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/62/10/3336/174...
> The upper gastrointestinal tract is well-endowed with taste and fat receptors, with sweet taste being detected, as elsewhere, by a heterodimer of the taste 1 receptor (T1R) family, T1R2/T1R3. These receptors have been localized to intestinal brush and enteroendocrine cells, and are coupled with α-gustducin as the α-subunit of the G protein (Fig. 1). They recognize sugars, d-amino acids, sweet proteins, and artificial sweeteners. Of importance to a possible role in the incretin response, these receptors are colocalized with glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and L cells containing peptide YY (PYY) and K cells containing glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) (3). Incidentally, fatty acid responsive GPRs are also coupled to GLP-1 release, but are found predominantly in the colon (5).
Can be restated in plain English: Cells in the GI tract between one's mouth and duodenum have similar sweet taste receptors - T1R. Some of these cells are endocrine and store GLP-1, PYY, and GIP (incretin) messenger hormones.
For context, messenger hormones cause changes in cells receptive to them, including the nervous system. Indirectly, these hormones can affect metabolism and feeling of hunger or fullness (this is not in the paper but is known).
The paper then discusses inconsistent (but meaningful) evidence for sweet taste receptors influencing the messenger hormone release and insulin-glycemia response. Notably, the author suggests sucralose sweeteners consumed before carbohydrates might spike postprandial (after-meal) blood sugar and insulin response. However, the extent of this effect could depend on an individual's genetics. The link between messenger hormone release and sweet taste receptors is established because this effect is diminished in vivo in mice lacking specific sweet taste receptors.
Yes, it's not unexpectedly complex for a science paper. But like many academic papers, it is needlessly complex. As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.
I often wonder - would it be that difficult to present academic writings in simple English, or at least to provide a plain English abstract? Publishing a paper takes months; what're the extra 10 minutes to make it more effective and readable?
You've taken a paragraph that contained a lot of details and was quite precise, and replaced it with wishy washy language. For example, they day that the cells they found are heterodimers of the T1R cells on your tongue, specifically T1R2/3. You replaced this precise explanation with the single word "similar", which could mean that they are enitrely different cells that are tautologically "similar" in also detecting sweet tastes.
They were also explaining exactly what the cells detect, which you thought is not worthy of mention.
The single short clear phrase "upper GI tract" you replaced with the longer and more akward "the part of the GI tract between the mouth and the duodenum".
Overall, your phrase would sound more complex and awkward to a practitioner, and you have reduced the information significantly. There is a reason technical language is used in technical papers - it allows you to be concise, information dense, and precise.
If the audience is the layperson, then of course you are right. The ideas being expressed will be completely lost upon the audience because they won't understand half the terminology used. But I suspect you might be in the minority if you think academic journals are intended to have an audience that broad.
Of course, I appreciate the value of jargon where it is necessary to convey meaning. Although Wikipedia has shown us plain English often conveys the entire meaning and details just fine, making jargon superfluous.
This paper, however, isn't the best example of jargon abuse. Some phrasing in it triggered me and I've reacted too strongly. Overall, it is relatively well-written.
More thoughts from another simple English advocate like me - http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html
> The upper part of your digestive system has lots of special cells that can taste things and sense fat. These cells have tiny helpers inside them called receptors, and when they taste something sweet, they send a message to your brain using a special chemical called alpha-gustducin. These receptors can also taste things like sugar, special proteins, and fake sweeteners. These cells also help your body make hormones that tell your pancreas to make more insulin when you eat something sweet. There are also other cells in the upper part of your digestive system that can sense fat, but they mostly live in the lower part of your digestive system.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvunt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. As a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, the Vl'Hurg challenged his vile enemy to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in its sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words "Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually the error was detected, but over two hundred and fifty thousand worlds, their peoples and cultures perished in the holocaust.
You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.
Better to stop wanting to taste sweet things all the time, than wind up type 2 diabetic or risk heart disease.
The real diet drug they need to concoct would be one that inhibits that habituation. Sugar or salt saturated foods would taste gross.
I have seen the recommendation that the daily sugar intake should be up to 50 grams, i.e. up to 25 g of fructose.
This seems a plausible value, which is equivalent with 500 g per day of most cultivated fruits, e.g. apples, pears or blueberries, or 300 g per day of the sweetest fruits, e.g. grapes or fresh figs.
The refined sugar is not bad per se, as it is the same substance found in all vegetables, but it is bad because it easily allows its wrong use when food is made which is too sweet and which facilitates the eating of too much sugar every day.
Limiting the daily sugar intake is easy if you cook at home, but it is difficult if you eat industrially-produced food. Unfortunately for those who like them, the first measure to reduce the sugar intake is to stop drinking any industrially-produced beverages.
Honestly, because these are thought pieces, because they seek to influence behavior, and because of the long history of the sugar lobby doing pernicious things to influence the public (even to the point of starting wars), I don't think they should be on HN unless the link is to a peer reviewed, reproducible, high-quality study.
BL: Without a large-N variable-isolated longitudinal study that distinguishes between different sweeteners, articles like the OP are indistinguishable from sugar-lobby FUD.
There's also an argument to be made that, in addition to cotton, the sugar trade contributed to the intense economic incentive for American slavery, leading to the American Civil War; that argument is weaker, however, since sugar wasn't as important as cotton to the South at large and since (to my knowledge) there wasn't a large consolidated commercial enterprise like DWIC for sugar (or Chiquita for bananas and the banana wars).
An explanation that I "like" for why all artificial sweeteners can be lumped in together is that the salient effect is the taste, not some unknown biochemical effect on gut bacteria or whatever.
Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame had an interview where he vividly described the experience of going on a potato diet. The concept is that you eat nothing but potatoes (and multivitamins) for a month, and this "resets" your relationship with food and also resets your tastebuds in some sense. There are two effects here, so lets unpack them a bit.
In terms of relationship with food, eating bland food makes you enjoy the process of eating less, which reduces the addictiveness. Fewer dopamine hits makes the whole process less enticing, so you don't snack as much (or whatever). I'm not sure about this one, so let's just ignore it for now.
What I definitely can believe is that if you eat a lot of any strong taste, you'll get accustomed to it. Your body will seek homeostasis, downregulating the associated receptors. That's why chilli heads can eat a ton of super spicy foods, their taste receptors (or associated neurons) change over time to compensate for the level of capsaicin. My partner loves spicy food so I got used to it, but if I go travelling for work for a month and eat bland food, my tastebuds reset and her cooking becomes inedible... for a week or two and then I can eat it again. Similarly, I can drink tonic water neat, and beer tastes sweet to me. For most people those are intolerably bitter. This is not some inherent trait that I have, my tolerance of bitter flavours is because I drink tonic water regularly. When I stop for a while, I can't drink it undiluted either... for a week or two.
Sweet is no different. If you overload your receptors with excessive amounts of any source of sweetness -- artificial or natural -- they'll adapt. You will taste things as less sweet, and add more sugar to compensate. You'll add more BBQ sauce, more honey, more syrup, etc...
And therein lies the source of the weight gain.
Penn describes going off the potato diet. His friend invited him to have a burger at their favourite burger place and Penn could not eat the burger because it tasted like overly sweet cake. That's what a burger is! The bun has sugar in it. The sauce has sugar in it. The meat patty is even grilled to caramelise the outside in a Maillard reaction!
When I drink diet softdrinks regularly, burgers taste meaty to me. When I stop, I can't have burgers from most places because they taste sickly sweet. I've literally put down half-eaten burgers because they were just "too much".
This could even be tested scientifically, and it wouldn't even be a difficult experiment.
Run four groups:
1) Control.
2) Taking tasteless pills with 'x' amount of artificial sweetener in it.
3) Adding 'x' amount of sugary drinks, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants.
4) Adding 'x' amount of artificially sweetened diet drinks to the diet, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants
Where 'x' is measured equivalent sweetness, not grams.
Do this for a month or two and see if group 2 has any effect distinguishable from group 1. I bet there's no or minimal difference.
Similarly, I bet both groups 3 and 4 gain weight relative to groups 1 and 2, but 3 ought to be the worst.
I also bet that you could try different artificial sweeteners, and it wouldn't make much difference as long as the equivalent sweetness amounts were used.
They did a baking sheet of fries in the oven and the mom literally put in a handful of salt on it. "Because it doesn't taste like anything otherwise".
They also didn't eat any vegetables for the same reason, the whole family was accustomed to bonkers levels of salt in their food so nothing "natural" tasted like anything to them.
The host had them do a similar thing like Penn's "potato diet" to reset their taste buds and it actually worked.
A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them.
Plus, I like the taste of diet coke more than just water.
Cans are easier to recycle than plastic bottles as well.
What a rotten situation to be in. Last time I was in India, there was a story on the local news about how the Coca Cola bottling plant managed to contaminate the product with motor oil somehow.
The streams running through Bangalore were black with all the stuff dumped into them. Although - I hear the whole city has changed massively since last I visited (almost 10 years back now). I would love to learn that things are better.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/21/the-horrific-scam-th...
Poor people don't have a choice or better knowledge.
Generally no; biological contamination came along with population growth and a lack of regulations, now you have biological contamination plus potentially industrial contamination (depending on where you are).
Also, less plastic used means less plastic that has to be disposed of somehow.
https://www.coca-cola.ca/faqs/coca-cola-faqs-health/do-coca-...
Many years ago I have stopped drinking milk at breakfast, and for some years I have replaced it with various herbal teas.
Then I have realized that the teas did not provide anything that I cannot get better from other sources, so I have stopped adding the teas to the water, drinking just the plain warm water and compensating by increasing the amount of fresh or defrozen fruits that I eat at breakfast.
Those that can afford to buy a drink can just buy the bottled water that Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) sell under various brands throughout the "third world".
> I'd rather drink a can of diet coke with aspartame in it than tap water with chlorine in it or bottled water with microplastics in it.
Chlorine is easily removed, and you can be certain that there are microplastics in your Diet Coke.
Artificial sweeteners tend to be very sweet, so the actual amount consumed is quite small, which means that their caloric content available to hypothetical bacteria that can digest them is also small.
I imagine that something else is going on here, likely involving the fact that sweeteners taste sweet and that the act of eating something sweet may have some effect in and of itself.
Fool? Taste buds aren’t sentient. So maybe you mean “activate”? But even then, just because something has taste, that doesn’t imply anything else at all.
Just like we can say that an SQL Injection payload is fooling the server to perform some operation, without having to attribute actual intelligence to a simple program.
"Taste buds want do taste sugar because they know how many calories sugar has, but they are fooled by this mean chemical, and it makes them feel bad, so blah blah blah." It gets so tiring.
Also, human studies have shown all of these sweeteners mess with metabolism, etc.
I’m not sure how this is still controversial. We knew all of this back in the early 1990s (if not earlier).
Calorie deficit will surely make you lose weight, but should only be taken as a guiding star when the goal is to lose weight and maintain it over the long-term.
Even if you are calorie counting (like the mice) the weight gain from lower metabolism is greater than the weight gain from having an equivalently sweet drink made from sugar.
High fructose corn syrup has a similar effect, but also delivers calories. If you want to drink soda, or eat sweetened things while losing weight, your best bet is to eat real sugar.
they gave her high fat diet, which causes ketosis and that's likely why mice didn't gain weight https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full/10.1139/apnm-2016-0346#.W...
Artificial sweeteners make your body go "Ooh incoming sugar!" and it "opens up" to receive huge amounts of energy in an easily digestible form.
When no sugar arrives, your body just grabs whatever it can, basically supercharging it's ability to suck out energy from any food.
The anecdotal advice I got was that it's OK to drink artificially sweetened drinks between meals as a snack, that way your body has nothing to grab. Just don't drink them with a meal, use water instead.
I mean, you can have an insulin response to rising blood sugar levels, but that won't happen with artificial sweeteners since there is no sugar.
What biological mechanism are you referring to?
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The body has a wide variety of sensing systems, and many receptors come in variants. A selective agonist is a molecule that activates some variants more than the others. Such a common and useful thing that there is a name for it.
I drank exclusively sugar free drinks for a good 15 years and started to notice that my farts started smelling _really_ bad. Like "_I_ need to leave the room" bad. Thought it was gluten or wheat, it wasn't. Changed to sugary drinks for a few weeks -> boom, bowel/intestine issues gone.
Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened. Now I'm a Coke drinker, not because I like it, but because it's the only one that's sweetened only with sugar.
The artificial ones I could literally drink like water, there are no satiation signals going to my brain so I could easily down 3 litres of Pepsi MAX a day.
I'm pretty sure your grandpa could also eat endless amounts of wheat products. If my grandpa tried that, he'd literally shit out his intestines because of the gluten (celiac's disease).
The problem doesn't seem to be just sugar.
I've found that the smaller 250ml cans is enough to satisfy any cravings.[1] Occasionally I take 2. Even with 2 that's 25% of what you are saying.
[1] http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/taming-my-soda-addictio...
I'm looking at Pepsi's website right now and the ingredients in Pepsi are given as "carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, sugar, phosphoric acid, caffeine, citric acid, natural flavor".
I guess it's theoretically possible that they're including artificial sweeteners under "natural flavor", but somehow I doubt it.
This is the one made here: "Vesi, sokeri, hiilidioksidi, väri (E150d), happamuudensäätöaine(E338), aromit (mm. kofeiini), makeutusaineet (E950, E955)"
It clearly states that in addition to sugar (sokeri) it has two sweeteners, E950 (Asesulfame K) and E955 (Sucralose).
I think the German version is sugar-only, at least the flavoured kinds.
Another disgusting chemist’s creation that you should definitely avoid if you want to lead a healthy lifestyle.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/why-high-fructose-corn-...
It's not a thing in Europe.
I have to rant: Every anti-HFCS person I've met always gives arguments without considering whether they apply to sugar as well. Always.
As an intuition, the fact that you taste something as sweet indicates that your brain has received a strong signal, and your hormonal responses are mostly regulated by signals sent from the brain to specialized organs.
In practice, the data strongly supports any well-studied sweetener increasing the risk of diabetes and also increasing hunger sufficiently to at least partially mitigate any caloric benefits.
The rest of the data I've seen on artificial sweeteners is a dogmatic quagmire with respect to cancers, neural issues, and whatnot, so I wouldn't personally want to draw many conclusions based on it, especially given the conflicts of interest in how most of it was generated. However, on both sides of the debate I think it's worth honestly considering at least those two dangers, especially considering the aggressive marketing of "natural" sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit with a strong implication that being natural means it's safe, and especially with detractors on the other side pointing to a bunch of shitty science over the years as evidence that sugar substitutes are probably safe.
It’s very compelling - some sweeteners have adverse metabolic effects and it is mediated by the microbiome [1]. Aspartame and stevia seem better than sucralose and saccharin. In theory, thaumatin should also be fine.
[1] As always this varies between individuals.
It turns out that sugar is the main nutrient in half of the products, even if you exclude cookies and candy.
Here in Norway (I grew up in the US), Pepsi Max or Coca-Cola "uten sukker" (without sugar) is heavily marketed. Regular Pepsi and Coca-Cola or local/generic brands are much better (and much more moderate tasting than the American counterparts, with hyper-sweet corn syrup), but cost a few kroner more because of the sugar tax. The sugar-frees are equally terrible tasting, like as if there was no real progress in actually making "sugar-free" satisfying. I don't drink much soda anyway, and if it is, it will just be the store brand - it's a treat more than diet staple. Even too much sugared soda will catch up to me.
Like alcohol, I have never deliberately moderated myself, but just have. It's not a point of pride, just something that happened. Because of this, I am not as tolerant to either alcohol or any type of sodas. I get buzzed too fast and I start feeling the soda after a little too much that I get a bit scared of both. Just like alcohol, I feel like people will rationalize sugar-free soda consumption based on some values that they have. The article mentioned that "diet" soda is a "guilt-free" treat - whether that's an value alignment to sell more or this is a genuine response from the consuming public, it is something I will not understand.
I mean, in the end, TANSTAAFL ... despite my sweet tooth, knowing I can get carried away (and my body lets me know!), I'd rather just eat sugar than chemical concoctions.
Coke Zero or the local variant still doesn't taste like Coke, but bitter fizzy water, to me :)
So, in the end of this - TIL :)
In terms of sweeteners which has the biggest effect on taste, Tab mainly used saccharin, while Diet Coke is mainly aspartame.
And then it's more accurate to reverse it and say Tab was a derivative of Coca-Cola. Tab was simply Coca-Cola's diet version back when they didn't want to "dilute" the trademark.
So no, Diet Coke isn't a "completely different drink". I mean, you can taste them side-by-side -- do you genuinely think there's some crazy different flavor profile in terms of the the citrus oils, cinnamon, and vanilla used?
"Diet Coke is not based on the Coca-Cola formula, but instead on Tab. The controversial New Coke, introduced in 1985, used a version of the Diet Coke recipe that contained high-fructose corn syrup and had a slightly different balance of ingredients."
Why would New Coke have been developed from Diet Coke if it tasted the same as Coca-Cola? Anyway you're wrong, but I admire the confidence.
But the main point here is that Diet Coke is not a "completely different drink" from Coke. You can go refer to your taste buds on that one. Especially since you seem to find Tab so wretched.
I question it because the Coke Zero we have here, very much unlike Diet Coke, is VERY sweet.
It’s genuinely pretty close to the real thing here, it’s sweetened with Sucralose which in my firm opinion does by far the best job at tasting like real sugar of the fake sweaters. I personally find it a very close approximation of regular Coke. It was actually closer and better though before the reformulation a couple years ago.
I might just do that, because I've seen too many people just repeat the Coca Cola marketing that they taste the same.
You can definitely tell them apart. Diet Coke though tastes nothing like Coke. Coke Zero tastes like a close approximation of Coke.
The first ever ad, AFAICT, for Diet Coke introduces it as "you're gonna drink it just for the taste of it", implying it's different than Coca-Cola [2].
Also, notice how it's branded as "Diet Coke" (initially "diet Coke"), not "Diet Coca-Cola", and has a distinct packaging. Whereas the zero variant is branded as "Coca-Cola Zero", with the same packaging but inverted colors or black font.
But they all taste like delicious over-sweetened fizzy drinks to me :)
So now I think people who prefer diet beverages may just not be tasting the same thing.
But guzzling sugar water is exceedingly unhealthy. And so if you want a beverage that's cold, fizzy and flavorful, you reach for the Diet Coke. Not because you think it tastes identical to Coke, but because the last thing your body needs is an injection of sugar.
Sure, sometimes you'll just refill your water bottle at the water fountain. But sometimes drinking just water gets boring, you know?
It's fine you'd rather have sugar than "chemical concoctions". But hopefully you can understand why plenty of other people prefer a chemical concoction to a sugar rush followed by a sugar crash?
And of course this also explains the newfound popularity of fruit-flavored unsweetened carbonated water like LaCroix, which has flavor but no sweetener whatsoever. But in a lot of situations, that product category is simply not available.
I think most people can't taste what to do though. For me for example coke zero has a very pleasant sweet taste and I prefer it to the original one.
Nutriscore is a proposed system to mark products as 'healthy' on a scale of 5 colour-coded values. It takes into account fat and salt and sugar (high amounts are 'unhealthy'), but not artificial sweeteners or other additives like preservatives or MSG.
I hate this. It will push sugar out of products, but, of course, artificial sweeteners will be put in instead. I've already seen artificially sweetened sweet-n-sour hering without any normal sugary alternative, because companies will of course try to produce few variants for efficiency. This is awful. I find the whole idea of condensing 'healthy' into a single small integer rather absurd as no amount of sugar or fat or salt or MSG is simply 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' on a scale of 1..5.
People are always looking for the easy way out. Cheap, industrially manufactured lies so you don't have to face the truth: Your self-discipline sucks. Put some effort into it and you'll not only stop lying to yourself and improve your diet, you'll also become a better human being.
You could taste the aspartame in Diet Coke, but Coke Zero, Sprite Zero and Fanta Zero are, in my opinion, better tasting than the original thing. But perhaps as unhealthy, if not worse. I'm in UK, in case there are regional differences.
But I agree about the Zeros tasting good.
We brought up out children (late '80s to late '90s) the same way, in fact that was not particularly unusual at the time here in Norway. When we visited friends in the US they were taken aback when my children asked for a drink of water instead of fizzy sweet stuff.
It seems to me that a lot of the problems associated with sugar and other sweeteners would be solved simply by ingesting less of them. But I don't know how to convince anyone else to try bringing their children up that way.
The posting a headline of “Are vegetables actually healthy!?”
I guess I can't drink any cola anymore, certainly not on a regular basis.
What seems interesting is that the non-caloric sweeteners they tested are completely different chemicals, and yet they all were correlated with weight gain or diabetes. It's as if just being a sweetener is enough.
That makes some sense to me. If a jolt of sweetness primes the metabolism for a glucose rush that never comes, perhaps the subject starts (unconsciously) hunting for another food that will provide the rush - starch might fit the bill, I guess. Or alcohol.
Someone noted that the article title is clickbaity. Of course it is - this is The Guardian, which is now effectively a tabloid. It's not really a newspaper of record any more.
Everyone knows that, but it just tastes so damned good.
Point being: Don't listen to this shrill health BS that purports to have new revelations about what's good for you or not, since this health advice comes in cycles. We saw the same thing with butter/margarine. First butter was good, then it was the devil and margarine was the only way to go. Then margarine was the devil and butter was the only way to go.
Even worse, not habting respect for complex systems! For some reason this type of thinking and "just fix" attitude seems to be particularly prevalent among the US, in particular Silicon Valley types.
("Too much sugar is bad, so replacing it with a sweetner solves the problem").
I'm sure to have stepped on a few toes, so let's hear who says "ouch".