I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I cannot taste sucralose (Splenda), or at least it tastes much less sweet to me that it does to other people. We bought some Jones diet soda that was sweetened only with splenda. My husband thought it was so sweet that it was like drinking syrup, whereas I thought it tasted like one of those unsweetened fruit-flavored seltzers. We also bought some sugar-free popsicles sweetened only with splenda, same thing: he finds them very sweet, I find it barely sweet at all. But on things sweetened with sugar, honey, or equal, we seem to find things to be the same level of sweetness.
So, why can’t I taste Splenda? I can’t seem to find anything on the internet about it-- surely I’m not the only person who can’t taste it?
Maybe your husband eats very few things with actual table sugar, and you eat more of them than he does? I use Splenda almost all the time, but after the rare times I do have something with sugar, for a day or two the Splenda and even things like oranges seems noticeably less sweet. It’s as though the sugar sets my perception of sweet to a higher threshold.
I can’t find any incidents of people that can’t taste sucralose from my searches on Google. Maybe there are better search terms. I can’t believe you are the only one.
The only physical explanation I can think of would be that your sweet receptors are different in such a way that they don’t react to sucralose, but I suspect you already drew that conclusion. As rowrrbazzle suggests, there could be a psychological component.
Can you taste saccharine (Sweet N Low) or aspartame (Equal)?
I like Splenda but it leaves a salty aftertaste in my mouth. I went back to Equal
One last thing is if you use a lot of Splenda can you taste it? Maybe you just need more. I never find any of the artifical sweetners as sweet as sugar. If I use three packs of sugar I need six of an artifical sweeter to get the same sweetness
While I can taste splenda just fine, I do suffer from what you might call “Splenda fatigue.” The first drink of something with Splenda tastes plenty sweet, but subsequent drinks are much less sweet. The equivalent never happens with sugar.
Are you sure you can’t taste Splenda, or are you just better at noticing the aftertastes associated with it? Personally, I’ve always been very distracted by aftertastes in artificial sweeteners. Saccharin was too chemically for me as a kid. And I hate Splenda, whenever I try it, I’m tasting it’s sickly sweetness for days afterward. :eek: Blech. I can kinda tolerate the weird taste of aspartame.
I don’t have exactly what you describe, but I have had Splenda taste like nothing to me. For me, it’s like the sweetness disappears after a couple days. For example, I make a batch of pudding sweetened with Splenda. First day, tastes sweet. Next day, it doesn’t taste sweet at all.
If I give some to hubby to taste, he says it tastes fine.
Regardless, I’ve given up Splenda. Even when I can taste it, it tastes like ass.
I’m sorry not to be able to back this up with a cite, but my own experience is that different sweeteners taste different to different people, and I assume there’s a genetic component. My partner and family all like isomalt, which tastes flat and bitter and not sweet to me, whereas I and my family like sucralose, which the other family finds nasty. I use stevia as well, which my family finds okay and she experiences as disgusting. These responses hold even when one doesn’t know which sweetener the other used in cooking. Neither family used artificial sweeteners when we lived with them, which, in any event, was many years ago, and neither of us has secret moral opposition to the other’s preferred sweeteners. We are both good cooks with sensitive palates, and both use a lot of seasoning and are not supertasters.
Saccharine I can taste, but I never use it, because it tastes nasty as well as sweet. Aspartame is what I normally use, I’ve learned to tolerate the taste of it in drinks. The times we did use Splenda, I tried using more, and it did make it sweeter, but not enough. I think I just felt ridiculous after putting nine packets of Splenda in a glass of tea I’d normally use three packets of Equal for, and gave up. Since Splenda is more expensive per packet than Equal, and I was using more, I quickly gave up on it as too expensive.
I can’t find anything on Google either, but it’s definitely not just you. I couldn’t really taste Splenda the one time I tried it. I tried a packet of Splenda-sweetened hot chocolate at work, and it didn’t taste sweet at all. I thought maybe I’d used too much water or something, so I dumped in a second packet, and it still didn’t taste sweet to me. I never had that problem with the hot chocolate packets that contained sugar, so I concluded that Splenda just doesn’t do it for me. It also had a vaguely unpleasant aftertaste, although not as bad as how aspartame tastes to me.
I think it’s probably a deficit for genetic reasons. There are various flavors and odors that can be detected by some people and not by others, and the detection ability is inherited. These are actually numerous enough and easily and accurately tested for, to the degree that they are useful for genetic research. I remember getting a little square of paper to taste in a high school biology class. Large fractions of the class could, or could not, taste them. I think the sense of smell in particular is very complicated in the sense that you have certain cells whose job it is to detect this or that one little molecular group, and so you need a huge variety of types of these cells, but it’s typical to have a less-than-full compliment of these. We generally get along just fine and never even know what we are missing, like competent English speakers whose vocabularies happen to be missing thousands of words that other people know but that they never truly need.
Napier could be right. For me, Splenda causes my mouth to feel as it has a film and I need to drink some ater For other people, it might be overpoweringly sweet.
It could be the opposite effect of sugar on me. For example, when I first ate something with Sriracha hot sauce (It’s the Asian hot sauce with a rooster on the label), I tasted it and complimented it tasted very sweet. Strange looks all around with everyone saying it was very spicy to them. Looked at the label and the second or third ingredient was sugar. Yet, try as they might during the rest of the meal, they couldn’t taste it.
That’s interesting, because I’m the opposite way, especially with Splenda. One packet of Splenda has about as much sweetening effect as two packets of normal sugar for me. I have both at the office and have been experimenting with that over the last few months, with both coffee and tea.
Bit out of date on this topic I know, but I’m with you Mark on this one. I have very acute tastebuds for some things. I found saccharine too bitter and I was wary of aspartame. So, for one brief period, I thought Splenda (sucralose) type products were the answer to my prayer. But, every time I used it regularly, I experienced extreme saltiness and dryness of my mouth. The closest symptoms I found on the web were for dehydration but I definitely pinned it down to sucralose.
Also, I discovered that it’s chlorine-based ? The other ingredients - dextrose and maltodextrin - I seem to be ok with, so this product is not for me I’m afraid.
There is controversy surrounding sucralose - as for many other modern products - but I’m basing my avoidance purely on my own experiences. It’s clear that reactions to foodstuffs vary enormously in the general populace - we’ve been using dairy products for eons but still there’s widespread intolerence -so any new product needs very careful evaluation. I suspect that the real answer is to learn to tolerate a very -reduced sugar diet. I’ve been told that it can be accomplished but I don’t relish the challenge ahead…
Nutrasweet/aspartame (but only at about half strength)
Saccharine
Xylitol
Acefulsame
Sweeteners I can’t taste (no sweetening power whatsoever):
Splenda
Stevia/Truvia
Maltitol
In some way I suppose this is a good thing in an evolutionary sense: My tongue isn’t “fooled” by these chemicals the way others’ tongues are. But in a practical sense, it makes trying to enjoy lower calorie foods pretty challenging, especially with all the ones I can’t taste increasing market share :(.