When cooking, sometimes the taste of the ingredients isn't everything. Have you ever forgotten to put salt to something you were cooking, and then tried to add salt after cooking to correct it? It doesn't taste the same because in addition to just tasting salty, the salt was supposed to participate in some chemical reaction while it was being cooked.
Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, but they lack its other chemical properties. Just because stevia works just as well as sugar when you put it in your tea, doesn't mean it will work well as part of a complex recipe or processed food.
certainly. I imagine the Coca Cola company put a ton of research into formulating Coke Zero and getting it accepted as well.
I'm not saying it's a simple substitution. But it's certainly possible, since there are home recipe versions. Nobody asked for parity - it doesn't have to taste the same.
But I'm already talking about a food - Protein Special K - that I expect to already taste like crap compared with some pure sweetness like Honey Nut Cheerios or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We're talkking about why even a food that does not have to meet as high a standard, that is literally a diet food for fitness-conscious people, still includes 20% sugar by weight?
So while I get what you're saying, it's still a perplexing state of affairs. It's not as though SOME of the cereals came in stevia versions, and some didn't. None of them do. Doesn't exist.
It's possible, it's easy - you can make it at home. It's not available.
And we have an example from the Coca Cola company and its diet coke / coke zero, which are great products, of getting the marketing and other parts right. You can get it everywhere, even McDonald's.
I'm not asking why there isn't a "diet big mac" that has 0 calories -- clearly an impossible goal.
I'm asking why entire aisles, such as the cookie aisles, breakfast cereal aisles, cake aisles, have no product choices, despite this being possible, with artificial sweeteners or stevia (at any price or in limited availability).
It just doesn't make sense. There is something/someone/some state of affairs, to blame here, and the fact that it's not a simple substitution isn't it. I don't need every product to come in a stevia version. But none of them do. This is perplexing, weird, and tells me that there is something/someone/etc to blame. Because you can look up recipes and see that it's easy. When I put artificial sweetener on my oats, I'm literally doing it at home. But no oat mix comes with that. I have to mix it myself. And this is true along many product categories.
Why? There is something fishy here. There is something/someone/some economic process/some state of affairs to blame.
Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, but they lack its other chemical properties. Just because stevia works just as well as sugar when you put it in your tea, doesn't mean it will work well as part of a complex recipe or processed food.