But if sugar is addictive, as it seems it is, this would cost a significant fraction of annual revenue to food producers, so there's no way they'd do it. Even if it's not literally addictive, it's clearly attractive and they'd take a big hit.
That's absolutely the problem. The current equilibrium is the results of an arms race. If any one manufacturer just cut sweetening by 50%, they'd be be screwed. We'd have to do it all together to reset everybody's tastes, and that's unlikely to happen.
It's a similar dynamic to advertising. In theory, advertisements give us new information about products. In practice, the biggest spenders are companies you've heard of pushing products you're familiar with. Approximately everybody on the planet knows what a Coke takes like but they spend $4 billion per year, or about 10% of annual revenue. Would consumers like it to be 10% cheaper? sure. Would Coca Cola Inc like $4 billion extra in profits? Most definitely. But they have to advertise because their competitors advertise, so we're all stuck in a wasteful equilibrium.
What baffles me is that artificial sweeteners exist and yet there is enough (imo) unfounded FUD about them that leads people to instead choose Sugar or Nothing (which inevitably translates to Sugar because of the pseudo-addictiveness you mention.)
Is wireheading bad? Maybe, but if I'm going to be doing it either way I'd rather reduce the harm.
I used to be a regular Diet Coke consumer. I used to get frequent migraines. A doctor suggested that might be related. I quit drinking them and sure enough, the migraines became way less frequent. Seems like only 2% of people have this problem with aspartame [1], but some of the fear is definitely justified. Maybe that's the only neurological effect it has, but I can see why some people pick sugar or nothing.
"Compare this to the week before, when Diet Coke sales were at £10.4m and classic Coca-Cola £10.65m. The data shows Coca-Cola value sales were higher than Diet Coke every week for the past year until the brand overhaul and subsequent introduction of the sugar tax. Since then they have diverged with Diet Coke sales increasing at a faster rate than classic Coke." [2018]
Beverages are interesting because there are now financial incentives to switch off of sweetened beverages: sweetened beverages are taxed higher in some municipalities (e.g. SF) and even banned in some school districts (e.g. PepsiCo has been selling Dasani and Bubly in some in-school vending machines instead).
Artificial sweeteners are not getting to the root of the problem. What people expect their food to taste like.
Why not dial back on the sweetness? Is it really that addictive? Why not drink water rather than cans of genuine or artificial sugar water.
FUD, sure. Personally I am uneasy about tricking my body that it is getting sugar when it is not. I am not waiting for scientific evidence.
The hippies were right. Eat food. Mostly plants. As close to raw as practical and tasty. If your great grand mother would not recognise it, it is not food.
I don't know how true it is, but one thing I've heard about artificial sweeteners is that your body thinks it's sugar, and will make your body feel hungrier because it expects it to have the same calories as regular sugar. I still prefer them because I hate the sticky feeling sugary products leave on my teeth, but I've talked to people who think artificial sweeteners are pointless from a calories-in/calories-out POV due to how your body reacts to them. For all I know that's completely made up though, they might have learned that from Dr. Oz or other daytime TV shows.
I'm pretty sure most of the "artificial sweeteners are evil" stuff is just moral panic to how they seem like cheating. It seems so unbelievable that any of them are especially bad for you or your habits, especially when compared to sugar.
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.
This is the exact kind of FuD that I'm talking about. There is a whole world of low-calorie sweeteners, Aspartame isn't the only one by a long shot. As you pointed out It's uncanny potency means that the amount of metabolites you end up with is vanishingly small. For most people it does not cause any problems. Certainly fewer than the 100% of people who art consuming calories when they consume sugar.
My suggestion is that for any food, read the ingredients! If you don't like Aspartame and won't trust anything made in a lab go with Stevia.
If you see me as FuD you might consider re-examining yourself?
Aspartame may not be the only one but it's absolutely the most common. And it really isn't very shelf stable and it really does taste nasty when it decays. If that's “FuD” then you're at war with taste buds?
Diet Pepsi switched to sucralose and had to switch back. Diet Coke sells a sucralose version but it's not at all popular. There are a couple smaller markets for offbeat sodas sweetened with stevia, but like someone else mentioned, stevia is a hella acquired taste, very soapy.
No that's fine, unlike one commenter replied, I am really not fear mongering here but just trying to answer the question—are people just upset that they're getting something for free? It's just that the most common sweetener legit starts to taste awful after just a little while in the can.
What about xylitol? I use it all the time putting it into morning coffee. I'm avoiding table sugar as much as i can, and generally prefer stuff that is not sweet, but coffee is the only thing that needs to be sweetened a bit to kill bitterness.
There tends to be more fearmongering about non-nutritive sweeteners (like sucralose and aspartame) than sugar alcohols, for whatever reason.
FWIW, in the last few years two new low-concentration sweeteners have grown a lot: erythritol and allulose. These tend to be tolerated gastrointestinally by more folks than traditional sugar alcohols. Erythritol is in some popular mass-produced food products like Vitamin Water Zero and Halo Top--it has a bit of a cooling sensation. Allulose tends to really just read 'sweet'. It's a little behind erythritol adoption, but I've started to see it in stores (Trader Joe's now carries it) and in random drinks (I've seen a couple smaller canned coldbrew coffees with it).
No, if there was a preponderance of scientific evidence, I'd accept it of course, but the alternative sweetener story isn't like that. There are papers out there on almost any topic with all sorts of results, many of which don't generalize, don't transfer, don't reproduce, or otherwise don't have the meaning they might point to if you guessed the implications.
Look for an artificial sweetener with a glycemic index of 0. For example, stevia (made from plants), erythritol, or mannitol. Xylitol has an index of 7, others even higher.
That doesn't necessarily help. Saccharin, aspartame and acesulfame-K have all glycemic index of 0, but have been found to alter food preferences in humans.
cf. Roberts et al., Uncoupling sweet taste and calories: Comparison of the effects of glucose and three intense sweeteners on hunger and food intake, Physiology & Behavior 1988 https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-9384(88)90207-7
I am one of those people. If even sip something with stevia in it I am going to be trying to get the taste out of mouth for hours. It makes me want to scrap my tongue off. It was truly the worst thing I have ever consumed. It has only happened a couple of times, now I am literally traumatized and check the ingredients on anything that is likely to have it.
For context, I am not a picky eater, there are things I don't like, but this is on a whole other level.
There are many others on the market now besides stevia. If added sugar is important to you, try the others because they all taste a little different. There’s also just plain maple syrup which is better than using pure sugar.
Depending on quantities, you are correct. Glycemic index and quantity tell you how the food affects your blood sugar levels. Whether or not you’re diabetic, keeping blood sugar levels low is important to health.
I had many unpleasant experiences with zero calorie sodas, especially if I started to consume them regularly. Belching, farting, reflux etc. Those always went away when I stopped. (I do not drink sugary sodas at all.)
So it wasn't as surprising for me to learn that there are suspicions that artificial sweeteners may alter gut biome.
There isn't any consensus yet, but my N==1 seems to agree with the suspicion. I am generally fairly sensitive to gut biome changes, even a few weeks on a different probiotics might change e.g. my sensitivity to milk.
The fact that artificial sweeteners are used as animal feed additive in order to increase body mass should give you enough to think what happens if we add it randomly to human food.
Yes, artifical sweeteners can be a good replacement for sugar, but things that shouldn't contain sugar in the first place should probably not contain artificial sweeteners either.
Artificial sweeteners in soda (Aspartame and Asesulfame K) make me fart out stuff that smells so bad that it should be banned by the Geneva convention.
But weirdly it somehow depends on the ratio of the ingredients. Some brands I can handle, others I can never partake in (Pepsi MAX being the worst offender).
After college, I started gaining weight (like many Americans), so I switched to using Splenda (sucralose/E955) in my coffee. Taste was fine, “after effects” were not. Pity, because I liked the taste a lot better than other artificial sweeteners.
You don't need lobbyists to explain this. Even in super-progressive SF and Seattle, there's immense popular resistance to a sugar tax on bottled drinks. The people like sugar, and the people are democracy.
