Well, I can only report what I experience. And even if it’s psychological, there was a first time, a time when I wasn’t expecting it and it caught me by surprise. (Since I so rarely taste sugar-sweetened drinks, it took a while before it didn’t catch me by surprise.) Now, sure, it could be psychological now, but the problem is, it wasn’t always. And the notion that it was real, but along the way became psychological, makes no sense.
I didn’t drink coffee, or consume anything with a sugar substitute, for the first 35 or so years of my life. I began drinking black coffee with pure sugar at about the age of 35, and noticed how much sugar I needed to add, so eventually decided to begin using Splenda. The yellow packets had just become popular, and knowing some of the historical cancer and health studies related to saccharin or aspartame, I figured the yellow was superior on all fronts, especially because I had tried diet sodas at various times when the sugared soda wasn’t available, and hated them (whether they contained saccharin or aspartame).
At some point, the yellow packets weren’t available and so I tried the blue. Blech! Never tried the blue again. Finally one day only the pink was available. That was eye-opening, as I found it much better than the yellow. Now it’s only pink for me. The guy at my normal morning coffee stand in Manhattan, who has never watched Reservoir Dogs (and who I haven’t seen since March) calls me Mr. Pink since I go to another stand on days that he doesn’t have the pink packets.
I’ve been carrying with me yellow Splenda packets ever since they were first introduced because it took several years before they became common.
I still do. Some restaurants don’t have sugar on the table at all, and in others the yellow disappears much faster than the pink or blue.
I’m not a big coffee drinker, maybe once a day, but over the years using Splenda in my coffee, in lite drinks, and to sweeten drinks in restaurants has saved me hundreds of thousands of calories. No, more than a million. Not a bad deal.
Math. One Splenda packet equals two sugar packets or 32 calories, minus some calories for the dextrose filler. Say 500 coffees a year for 20 years. 10000*25 = 250000 calories. Triple that for the larger volume of lite drinks, which is an underestimate of how much sugar gets replaced. That’s a million right there.
I take it with me when I go out of the country. I needed it in Greece, where, for some reason, they didn’t seem to have any sugar-replacer on the tables (if I’d asked for it, I probably could have gotten it, but there was none in the hotel rooms with the coffee maker either, and why ask for it when I had it in my pocket?) In Israel and Costa Rica (and I was in Costa Rica for six weeks, so I’d brought a crap-ton of it), it turned out to be totally unnecessary.
Further anecdotes: Kaylasmom’s doctor ordered her to cut down on sugar, so we went with diet sodas. A friend who used to come over a lot had a poor reaction to aspartame, so we switched to Shasta brand sodas, which are sweetened with Splenda, and got used to it.
Here’s a question that never occurred to me before. I was around and aware when cyclamates got banned in the US (and cyclamate-sweetened beverages tasted indistinguishable from sugar-sweetened, IIRC. But I digress). But even at the time, the only sugar substitute that you could obtain for household use was saccharine in those eensy-weensy tablets (that NEVER dissolved in a cup of coffee. But I digress).
Anyway, had cyclamates NOT been abandoned as an artificial sweetener, would they likely have been packaged for household and tabletop use? Do they have cyclamate packets on the tables at Tim Horton’s? What color are they?
I could swear I saw packages of a sweetener at a restaurant in Windsor that contained cyclamate and possibly saccharine or aspartame.
This was back in 1998 so my memory may be skewed.
I do remember we had Funny Face with it at our house when I was a kid in the 60’s. It tasted identical to Kool Aid with added sugar.
Heh. In a small ziplock bag? 
In yellow packets, for just what you are implying.
OK. I’ve seen it for sale in a bulk bag.
And I’ve bought it that way, but to travel with it, especially over the border, I got the little yellow packets.