I mean, I don't think anybody thinks artificial sweeteners taste exactly like sugar. In fact they can't since they generally have an entirely different mouthfeel, on top of whatever residiual bitterness there might be.
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.
Look around. This whole thread is about how the tradeoff of artificial sweetener is worse than you think it is. In toto it's pretty bad in fact. There is no 'health case' for diet soda. The person who put those four words next to each other in your brain was in marketing, probably when you were still a kid.
There's a hedonic treadmill with sweets. If you stop consuming processed food with refined sugar for a while, the common complaint is that they are too sweet to drink. We have to acclimate ourselves to drinking soda regularly. Can you see how screwed up that is?
Artificial sweetener is trying to keep our unhealthy relationship with sweets but cut out the consequences (or rather, trade them for other consequences).
I'll admit that I do enjoy the occasional sugary soda, but I try to keep that to a minimum. I find that I prefer flavored sparkling water like La Croix (which does not contain any sweetener) over diet soda. I still don't find La Croix in restaurants hardly ever, but it's becoming more and more common in grocery stores.
Maybe your tastes adjusted to the different sweetener and you just don't like the taste of regular Coke? There are flavors of Jarritos that I can't stand (lime, eugh) regardless of their sugar content.
What I took from the article was that artificial sweeteners don't drive you into sugar binges but exaggerate desire for sweet foods, making you more likely to choose to eat something sweet at a given moment. And that's the thing - your brain craves sugar, but recognizes it through (and thus seeks out) sweetness. So a likely result is that you'll compound the effect with more diet soda. This sounds easy to resist, but the innocuity of another soda can be disarming. I suspect I would find a way to rationalize it.
Yep. I used to drink a lot of diet soda. I stopped that probably 10 years ago or so. I don't use artificial sweeteners in anything. I mostly drink water now. When I drink coffee or tea it's unsweetened. For an occasional treat such as a milkshake I will use sugar, sparingly.
Incidentally, when I drink diet soft drinks now they taste like chemicals. Completely unnatural sweetness. I don't find them enjoyable at all. But when I used to drink them daily, I liked them, really almost craved them.
They are trying to replicate the assault on your taste buds that is sugar soda. They've gotten pretty good at it.
The problem is that the levels of sweetness, acidity, salinity, carbonation etc. in diet soda have become normalized. People give these dessert drinks to children, and drink it like it's water.
You know how overpoweringly strong some chocolate mousse can be? The kind where you can't finish a tiny slice of cake because more than a tiny sliver on your fork is too rich? Or how some foreign cuisines can be so potently dosed with curry or pepper that you can't taste any other flavors in the dish? Imagine replacing white bread throughout your diet with that chocolate cake. Or the punch of salt and pepper on an egg with that level of curry.
Ask someone from 100 years ago to sweeten a glass of lemonade "to taste" and you'd get something so weak that a consumer of diet soda would mock it like the meme "hint of hint of lime" or "transported on a truck near strawberries" flavors of LaCroix.
Yes it's better that they drink diet than regular soda. No, it's not good to normalize that flavor. I think human appetites are just not set up to handle some stimuli that previous levels of foraging or farming, chemistry, and distribution systems could not create.
There is a lot of variation in how people taste artificial sweeteners.
In my informal surveys, some people think Diet Coke tastes sweeter than regular Coke, and some people think regular Coke tastes sweeter. In general, people seem to prefer the one that tastes less sweet.
I concluded a some time ago that soda drinks weren't adding a lot of value for me at all. And I heard some people claim that the artificial sugars actually are not that great for you. 1) they teach your body that sweet stuff has no nutrition, which then becomes a problem when you actually eat sweet stuff 2) sweeteners like aspartame build up in your liver and fat deposits, which may or may not have long term impact. 3) artificial sweeteners can cause issues with your gut bacteria/cause some irritation. All of that may or may not be true and I never really experienced any of that.
I used to just order a cola light/zero/diet in restaurants but it was more of a habit than something I actually particularly enjoyed. These days I usually go for water, tea, or coffee. Small change, probably a lot healthier, and I actually enjoy drinking it.
Different stroke for different folks. I drink Diet Coke, not because I'm on a diet, but because I grew to like the taste of it better. Regular sugar coke, and high fructose corn syrup coke, tastes cloyingly sweet to me.
I don't (usually) drink cola for the caffeine, as far as I'm concerned that's just there as a legal way of getting customers chemically addicted to their product. I didn't think many people (consciously) bought it specifically for the caffeine at all.
As for diet - I also don't drink it because I want to ingest sugar. I have plenty of food energy available to me as a first world person living in 2017 and if anything, too much of it. The sugar is there purely to make the drink taste good. I didn't think anyone else really drank it for the purposes of ingesting sugar either. In some drinks (No for Dr. Pepper, but yes for Pepsi), I find the artificial sweetener tastes perfectly acceptable.
I drink cola because it tastes good and satisfies thirst. Not because I want caffeine or sugar. Those two things are bad for me.
Since I don't want the caffeine, and I'm satisfied with the taste of artificial sweetener, I drink caffeine-free diet cola. It still satisfies the goal of quenching thirst and tasting good.
I'm not drinking less water because I'm drinking artificially sweetened soda; I'm drinking less genuinely sweetened soda. I have no illusion that my diet soda is better than water, but that seems to be what most comparisons are between.
And maybe some day I'll remove diet soda, but for now it's not competing with water; it's competing with soda, and I suspect it's at least an upgrade in that regard.
You can do it yourself. I used to drink a lot of sweetened soda. I switched to diet, then stopped. Regular sugar-sweetened drinks taste sickeningly sweet to me now, and diet drinks taste like chemicals.
Once you break the habit, your sense of taste recovers and you realize how nasty these drinks are. Most people get started on them as kids when you don't have a nuanced sense of taste and really crave sweet stuff.
Sloppy perhaps, but the point is still conveyed adequately. A diet beverage might not taste identical (Coca Cola Company acknowledges this, and in fact their diet products have a different flavour profile designed to better match the artificial sweeteners) but they certainly can be an adequate substitute when it comes to satisfying your brain's sugar cravings.
When it comes to pop, I usually stick to cola - and when it's cola I'll never buy it unless it is made with real cane sugar. Boom, potential side effects of artificial sweeteners are gone, and the drink tastes way better. And just drink more water. Why is this so hard for people?
This,the after taste, plus the negative health effect of artificial sweeteners is more than enough reason for me to steer clear of diet. While the calories may be cut, I would rather cut down on my soda intake and get the real thing.
I think sparkling water is a great alternative, but I'm skeptical that all the fake sugars will turn out to be much better in the end. We seem to have a habit of replacing known bad things with things that we just haven't found out are bad yet.
I used to hate diet colas, but then I became diabetic and had no choice but to drink them if I wanted a soda (I don't drink much pop in general). After a few years I just stopped being able to taste the weird diet aftertaste it used it have. In fact sometime I worry I wouldn't be able to taste if I were drinking a sugar cola by mistake.
So now I think people who prefer diet beverages may just not be tasting the same thing.
You might be used to really sugary drinks, i was an obese child and once my nutritionist took away regular coke and juices from me i couldn't drink a sugary drink without feeling disgusted at how sweet it was and artificial sweeteners tasted a lot better.
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.
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