I’m with Dr. Strangelove on this. Diet sodas have always tasted like piss to me. Just last week I tried a Coke Zero and all it took was one sip - just as hateful to me as any other diet soda. I was disappointed because I might otherwise have tried it instead of going cold turkey as I am now.
I’m curious about this, too. Isn’t the carbonation bad for bones?
Thanks for the feedback, though frankly I have no idea what to make of it. Maybe I’ll get a single can of regular Coke at some point and do an A-B comparison. But regardless, I enjoy the diet stuff, and I’ve seen people posting in discussions that they, too, think that Coke Zero tastes just like regular Coke, and I certainly have no problem with it, though I know that in the past I hated diet sodas. I still remember the awfulness – it was a kind of unnatural sweetness followed by a bitter aftertaste. Blech!! The current drinks, to my taste, are nothing like that.
I did resolve one other mystery, though. There was a HuffPo article about the switchover from Coke Zero to Coke Zero Sugar that claimed it was actually exactly the same stuff, just a change in branding. According to the Coca Cola Company, however, the change was in the blend of proprietary “natural ingredients” which appear on the label identified as just those two words, so although the list of ingredients found on the labels for the two versions of Coke Zero are exactly the same, the formulations are indeed slightly different.
That’s funny, I’ve always heard it was bad for the bladder.
If you drink Diet Coke long enough, you eventually come to like the taste so much you can’t drink any non-diet Coke. Also, you can easily distinguish between diet coke & diet pepsi (gross).
Our brains are just fucking with us.
My recollection is that I just switched to Diet Coke as a dietary calorie-management thing and found no problem with it. Then a friend suggested I try Coke Zero instead, and while I found no really major difference, I decided I liked it and stuck with that. So it wasn’t an acclimatization, AFAICT.
And though our brains may very well be fucking with us, the additional complicating factor is that modern artificial sweetener blends are indeed far superior to the old stuff. So maybe it’s a combination of things that will forever be a mystery. Maybe my tastes have changed in my older and wiser years, and if so, it’s been in the direction of less sweetness. As much as I like iced tea, I find both the prepared regular sugared kinds and the sugar-free kinds a bit too sweet. When I get coffee to go, I always ask for a half-portion of sugar.
Several years back, I switched to plain (unsweetened) black iced tea. It took me about 2 weeks to get used to not having colas with lunch and dinner and for snacks.
About a month after switching I tried a cola and it was SO nasty. WAY too sweet. I guess my tastes changed.
Recently I’ve been trying to have the iced tea stop at 3pm or so and switch to water after. That’s been a bit tough, but I’m getting there.
It is true, they have improved tastes of these softdrinks dramatically. Before I quit colas, our family really enjoyed Diet Dr. Pepper’s, even though I had been a Coke drinker most of my life, thought they were exceptionally good.
Of course the real problem remains the health risks that have been associated with it, increased heart disease, strokes, diabetes, weight problems, even if they cut out the sugar, much remains to be known about the sugar substitutes, and of course I think both regular sodas and the diet variety, all or most have high levels of phosphoric acid or phosphates, which can also be disastrous for bone health if you’re not getting enough calcium intake.
There’s no need for me to quit soda because the only time I drink it is when I mix it with wine. Water, tea, coffee and homemade lime and lemonade. But mostly freezing cold ice water. Love the stuff.
Oh wait, now that I think about it, sometimes when we order Chinese food delivery, they’ll include a free 2 liter soda if we spend over a certain amount. I’ll get ginger ale and drink it all up. And even more occasionally than that I’ll get some ginger beer or Carib Sorrel or Ginger Shanty. All of the above counts for less than once a month though.
I think I just proved I don’t need to give up soda, I need to give up alcohol.
I gave up sugared beverages ~15 years ago. I realized I was drinking ~500 calories per day, and realized I’d have an easier time maintaining my weight if that number miraculously became zero.
That was just after Splenda started really taking off. Even then, I was drinking less soda than coffee and sweet tea, so I replaced sugar with Splenda in both of those. They’re not no-cal, since I take a dollop of half-and-half in my coffee, and a few ounces of lemonade in each half-gallon pitcher of tea. But they’re close enough.
And at the time, I could get Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, which is the one commercial no-cal beverage I’ve actually liked. But DCVDP is only distributed in certain regions of the country now, so I can’t get it anymore. So I’m down to just the coffee and sweet tea. I will drink sugared sodas when I’m at Burger King or wherever, but that’s not often enough to make a big difference.