Nutrasweet & Summer Temps

Have you even noticed that often diet sodas’ taste really varies? Sometimes, I have noticed this. A friend of mine heard something about Nutrasweet being quite temp sensitive. If left to sit in a warm truck, for example, the Nutrasweet changes its chemical structure. (It could be denatured, for example.) Anyhoo…

Does any SDoper know anything more about this? If it were rampant, then I WAG Coke, Pepsi, etc., would use refrigerated trucks. Still…perhpas this is the root cause for the weaker-tasting diet sodas?

Just wondering what the unwashed masses may know…

  • Jinx

I don’t have any definitive answers, but I’ve read before that aspartame breaks down into dangerous chemicals when heated above something like 90 degrees. I’ve even heard the theory that it’s what’s behind gulf war syndrome, but it was from a place with an agenda.

There are tons of anti-aspartame sites out there that you can google that’ll detail what they think about aspartame break down and such.

Read this.

Nutrasweet definitely ages and loses it’s sweetness over time. That does cause varying tastes in my experience.

I’ve researched it and come to this conclusion:

even IF aspartame isn’t 100% safe (which I doubt, evidently even if it does break down into methanol the amount ingested isn’t much higher than normal everyday doses from the environment), the damage from such toxins will probably harm me less than an extra 100 grams of sugar a day in a couple of glasses of coke…that’s A LOT of sugar (weigh it out sometime). I recently lost a lot of weight, in large part due to diet drinks. I used to have about a liter of coke a day, which is at least a pound a week of weight.

Grampa’s diabetic so there’s a mix (a large mix) of regular and sugar-free candy in the house. This summer it was EXCEEDINGLY hot and humid up here, and the age and condition of our house exacerbated the climate.

During that time period M&Ms not only melted in my hand, they melted in the glass canister in which they’re kept. After the weather got normal they and the rest of the hard candy returned to their normal state, but some - maybe 40% - of the sugar-free hard candy remains “chewy”.

I thought perhaps it was what was mixed with the aspartame, but the Cafe Solo is all chewy…but the Corazon de Cafe is fine. There are two different menthol-type candies in there; one is chewy, one is fine. They’re all made by the same candy company, and they were all stored in the same container over the summer.

You tell me what’s going on.