[The Verge] You don’t have to freak out about aspartame in your diet soda
theverge.com
"The IARC will reportedly classify aspartame as a possible carcinogen. But this isn’t a food safety agency, and the context matters."
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Soda companies could literally just switch to stevia or monk fruit tomorrow and it wouldn't be a problem. The only issue is their refusal to change.
Aspartame doesn't taste great, but stevia is just awful
A lot of people complain about it, but I don't have any problem with it. I enjoy stevia-based sodas like Zevia or even hard seltzers with it (Truly has a few) with no problem. I wonder if it's one of those things where it tastes different to various people like cilantro.
It is. They've done research and found that basically all artificial sweeteners have a genetic component. For me personally, stevia tastes like soapy bitter lawn clippings, while aspartame and sucralose taste basically normal. A few of my old standby drink mixes swapped to stevia a couple years ago, and I instantly noticed and couldn't finish them.
Ace-K is my favorite tasting low calorie sweetener. Diet coke from a fountain dispenser is Ace-K and aspartame mix, while bottled is only aspartame.
It's the most metallic, awful tasting thing. It feels like I'm allergic to it or something. Like it makes my mouth subtly burn.
I'm more of a monk fruit person myself too honestly.
I got some monk fruit at the discount grocery store where they have random discontinued things and it was a huge bag of little mini pixie stick sized, single serve packets of monk fruit powder and I ate the whole bag like they were pixie sticks and I was a six year old on Halloween.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32811239/
TL;DR Stevia is shit and bad too
I find stevia based sodas taste better anyway
But it tastes like crap. At least to a part of the consumers. That seems to be some genetic variation or something, the after taste of sweeteners is so bad. 😵💫
Yeah buuuuuuuuut bottom line et al
If you don't mind me being pedantic, "et al." is short for "et alia" which means "and other people". "Etc", short for "et cetera", means "and other things". You only use "et al." when talking about people not named in a list.
The More You Know 🌠
Which I don't understand. It literally would be cheaper for them to use stevia or monk fruit and call it a day than to quibble over something so trivial.
On the scale of Pepsi or Coke, a seemingly trivial amount like 1/2 a cent a can adds up to significant money. It's amazing how companies pinch pennies when dealing in volume like that. They sold 32 billion cases of beverages in 2022. No idea what the real figure is, but let's say 5,000,000,000 of those are diet drinks with aspartame... that's 120 billion cans, so if the other sweetener cost only 1 cent more per can that's 1.2 billion dollars.
Since the verdict on aspartame isn't clear, they'd also have to tweak the formula for flavor, and switching would be somewhat of a PR admission that there's something wrong with aspartame, I imagine they're very reluctant to change anything.
Bottom line won't change when users of your product are addicted. Since coke etc. are full of sweetener, which I assume causes a similar level of addiction to regular sugar, those that drink it won't mind if the price goes up 5 cents or whatever because cola put some slightly better sweetener in it. Cola would probably just make a new branded version or slap a "new an improved flavour" on the can and jack up the price by 10 cents anyway. Actually, people are pretty particular about the flavour, so that's probably why they won't do it. They must have gradually shitted up the recipe to get to the current version so people didn't burn down coke HQ.