Ask HN: Sugar packets with something other than sugar? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Sugar packets with something other than sugar?

7 pointsJoeAltmaier6 comments

Anybody else experiencing sugar packets with non-sugar white powder in them instead?

At a local restaurant I ordered regular tea because they don't have sweet tea. Emptied a sugar packet in and stirred fifty times with the table knife (nobody has those long-handled iced-tea spoons any more!)

Took a drink and it wasn't sweet, not a particle, not one iota of sweetness. What gives?

No sugar crystals on the bottom of the cup, which are always there because cold beverages don't dissolve sugar well.

What's happening?

I dumped another sugar packet in and watched - it rained down and ... disappeared!

So, it isn't sugar. Dumping some in my hand, wetting a fingertip and dabbing, get a taste and ... nothing. No sweetness.

The packets were marked SysCo, so that doesn't tell my anything.

I'm kind of worried. Somebody substituted some white powder for sugar, sold it to SysCo, who distributed it to unsuspecting millions. Is it just corn starch? Something more sinister? Is it edible at all? Am I gonna get sick?

Concerned in Iowa.

"I can't taste it" and "it dissolved more quickly than I expected" doesn't make for particularly great evidence to support this grand sugar replacement conspiracy.

You might have recently had a mild cold/flu/covid infection that left you with a diminished sense of taste that day.

The time it takes sugar to dissolve is affected by a lot of things, including the size of the granules, which might have been closer to powdered sugar than the much larger crystals you're used to seeing in restaurant packets. Just because your drink was cold doesn't mean sugar can't very quickly dissolve in it.

If you're genuinely concerned about this, get a sample of it and send it to a chem lab for testing. That's going to be the easiest way to get evidence worthy of the claim you're making ("it isn't sugar").

Flu, cold, and SARS-nCov2, affect your smell, which is a large part of what people call "taste", but not all of it.

Your ability to taste the basic tastes: salty, bitter, sour, and sweet is unaffected because it is managed by your tongue, not your nose.

"Loss of taste, one of the most common and frustrating symptoms of COVID-19 infection, appears to be associated with persistent damage to taste buds caused by low amounts of the virus that can linger for months or even more than a year."

https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/lingering-covid-virus-tongue-li...

the much more common symptom is loss of smell, characterized as "loss of taste" by laymen(/women/children). The very study you link to says so (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37265267/)

Well if we are going to use Occam's razor about symptoms, I think we should apply it to the overall situation as well.

Either Sysco is engaged in a conspiracy to poison us all with sugar packets for no apparent benefit. Or the much more logical conclusion that a person put a pack of sugar into their tea, it didn't sweeten it as much as they thought it should, they then convinced themself it wasn't sugar at all and when tasting it their belief that it wouldn't be sweet biased their observation.

Not a covid issue. Real sugar packets taste fine.

Really, this wasn't even crystals. Just fine white powder. Ground plaster? Corn starch? Much more likely.

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