I will never understand how people would think artificial sweeteners even taste like sugar. Particularly as it relates to soda, it always tastes distinctly ... chalky or at least an under-taste of bitterness. Can't people taste that? I associate that taste also with the feeling I get, like drinking tea on an empty stomach, a touch nauseated. When younger in the 80s-90s, my sister and mother would gulp down Diet sodas, but I would never touch it - they were nasty tasting. My wife experiences the same sort of feelings also.
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.
Artificial sweeteners are not sugar and only taste "exactly like" sugar to some percentage of the population. Hence all the different sweeteners.
So count yourself lucky that pepsi zero does not taste awful to you.
It’s entirely possible, most artificial sweeteners have a chemical taste to me and if I consume them it unsettles my stomach for a couple hours. My mother is the only other person I’ve encountered with the same condition. My father and brothers can’t tell the difference. I can ingest real sugar and corn syrup without issue, but they taste very different to me. I discovered sodas made with real sugar about ten years ago - wow - those mexican cokes are amazing, but costs twice as much.
I've tried several, as my ex-wife was into that kind of thing. They all taste terrible to me. Some other things that taste terrible to me that other people claim are sweet: aspartame and saccharin. They don't taste sweet to me at all, just nasty. Sucralose tastes bad too, though it at least tastes sweet, just in a really nasty way. Stevia tastes sweet too, just in a nasty way.
I wonder how much of this is how much people are used to: if you keep drinking diet soda for years and years and "acquire" a taste for it, maybe then real sugar will taste weird to you.
When I experience aspartame, the host product tastes "wrong", and if I consume more than a wee bit, my stomach gets a bit upset. So, let me ignore that sweetener…
When I use most artificial sweeteners, at first they can seem enjoyable and freeing. A 50:50 blend of Stevia-in-the-Raw and Splenda can seem more like real sugar to me. But with repeated frequent use (say, daily in a mug of tea), I gradually come to feel not an anticipation of something good and satisfying but an expectation of doing something 'empty'. Sweetness in general becomes increasingly distasteful.
Perhaps the distaste is due to lack of metabolic reward. However, after a few days of not wanting sweetness, a little bit of real sugar can reset me to enjoying sugary things. Takes longer to again enjoy an artificial sweetener.
The whole war on sugar is baffling to me. After I had my first glass of soda in a decade, my impression is that artificial sweeteners are garbage. Poisonous, too. But this has been known for decades, hasn't it. It's cheap, though.
As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes
So first off, just about all of these artificial sweeteners are like 200x sweeter than sugar or higher. This kind of means that you have high amplification which comes with distortion—artificial sweeteners do not taste like the real thing. So those chemical aftertastes are probably the biggest contributors to skepticism.
Second, the most common artificial sweetener right now is aspartame, and it is kinda nasty stuff. Don't take my word for it, drink a Diet Coke that's about 1 week before expiration and see if you can stomach it—it's foul. That foulness is the metabolites of aspartame, I want to say one of them is formaldehyde? They are pretty nasty and you do produce them after drinking a Diet Coke, they appear in urine afterwards. The aspartame also bears a cryptic warning for people with phenylketonuria, and it might legit make consumers feel worse, as in reduce their serotonin and dopamine and make them more irritable.
The only silver lining on this cloud is that because this stuff is 200 times sweeter than sugar, you actually only get a very low dosage per each individual beverage. Because of that very low dosage, we are thankfully not seeing huge epidemiological problems from it yet. But yeah, a combination of nothing tasting right and the poster-child being awful is a decent recipe for conspiracy theories.
Some of us are genetically unable to process saccharin, aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. If I have any of those, I can taste it for hours and hours afterwards as it circulates and recirculates within the body. I assume it gradually gets excreted by my kidneys.
At high dosages there is some nausea.
I once bought a bottle of soft drink that had no indicators like 'Diet' or 'Sugar Free' on the label. I drank all of it, about 700 mL. An hour or so later, I had the distinctive 'sweetener taste' in my mouth along with some nausea. Because I avoid artificial sweeteners like the plague, I was temporarily puzzled by this. I thought back over my day, and worked out that I had had that bottle of soft drink. I dug the bottle out of the bin and examined the label for the ingredients list. There I discovered that most of the sugar in the soft drink had been silently replaced by artificial sweetener, most likely as a cost reduction.
That's not really the same thing, you simply dislike the taste of artificial sweeteners. I dislike Stevia too, I can drink a cup of coffee with it once a day, but if I eat two subsequent things sweetened with stevia I feel like throwing up. Aspartame on the other hand tastes pretty much ok in soft drinks, dunno about other foods.
I just avoid artificial sweetener as a category. They all taste like chemicals to me anyway. I used to drink a lot of Diet Coke but have hardly touched it for years. It tastes like weed killer to me now.
I fundamentally couldn't much care less about the supposed effects of one synthetic sweetener over another versus highly processed sugars, if it were't for the fact that as soon as I taste whatever synthetic sweetener it is, it tastes disgusting to me.
I just don't get how people are content to consume this stuff - they markedly change the taste, indelibly affecting the thing they're sweetening. Heck, even stevia adds its own distinct nastiness to whatever it flavours.
So, I stick with sugar, and just consume waay less of it than I used to. Though this somewhat limits the choice of soft drinks I can enjoy consuming when it comes to a treat.
Same experience. Aspartame and every other artificial sweetener tasted disgusting to me. I’d find where it was hidden in all sorts of things because the taste stood out so much.
Found I could tolerate Sprite Zero. Drank enough of that when it was all that was available that it didn’t taste disgusting anymore, then tried some Coke Zero and it didn’t taste so bad anymore. From there pretty much everything was on the table.
All of this is anecdotal, so discard if you wish. I've never tasted it on its own, but you can get sodas sweetened with sugar or HFCS or many fake sugars. For me, the fake sugars have distinct aftertastes that I find unpleasant; sugar vs HFCS is more subtle, but I get more satiation from sugar sweetened than HFCS sweetened so I'm less likely to drink large quantities of sugar sweetened beverages vs HFCS sweetened. I don't know if any are still sold, but beverages sweetened with a mix of sugar/HFCS and sucralose were harder for me to detect the sucralose aftertaste. I also find sucralose to have a less offensive aftertaste than aspartame.
I don't care which of them is least bad for you, my problem is that all artificial sweeteners taste terrible!
If I consume something that contains aspartame or sucralose, I can taste it, and I don't like it. Even Stevia tastes awful.
And what I really hate is that sucralose is now being used in lots of non-diet beverages that also contain sugar or corn syrup! The Arizona Beverage Company does this with some of their drinks, for example.
It might also have something to do with acquired taste - maybe people who can tolerate artificial sweeteners have simply gotten used to the weird flavors they add and don't taste them anymore?
I don't really understand the popularity of artificial sweeteners. They all taste totally teh ick to me. I would much rather have something that is not sweet than something that is artificially sweet.
But judging from the beverage selection available at just about any convenience store, I'm possibly the only person in the USA who would rather drink something that isn't sweet than something that contains 0 calorie sweeteners.
Also, whilst I understand many/most people can't taste the difference, the swap to using sweeteners has had the same level of disgust to my taste as stirring in a teaspoon of salt into almost every soft drink.
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.
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