It isn’t that tough. My standard daily Diet Dew consumption is 72 ounces - two 24 oz bottles while at the office, and 2 cans when I get home over the evening. (And then insomnia, but that’s surely not connected). That’s just over 2 liters on a regular day.
I’m bitching today because the vendor who sells teh 24 oz bottles is off, and I am forced to make do with 20 oz bottles, for a quarter more each!
I had a similar complaint a while back about how the powdered versions of aspartame and sucralose contain mostly powdered glucose and maltodextrin, yet say they contain zero calories. And at least some varieties of Crystal Light and its generic clones contain maltodextrin, yet say “sugar free.” Apparently there’s some loophole in the United States about how you can round down to zero if the calories are low enough per serving. The calories don’t bother me that much, but for those of us who prefer artificial sweeteners to avoid tooth decay, it’s a problem.
I’m waiting for the left-handed sugars so that we will have diet soda calories with full-soda taste (and no nasty metallic aftertaste - that’s the deal breaker for me) - Actually, after reviewing that wiki (and a few other on-line articles), Tagatose seems to not exactly be left-handed sugar after all, but works the same as left-handed sugar would.
If in fact they do create ‘sugar’ w/o the drawbacks of regular sugar, would then all the diet soda fold up into the regular brands (i.e. Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Dr. Pepper…all gone - just Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper et al), or, more likely, would all the diet sodas just get new names (I guess this has happended since the days of Tab if not earlier) and be marketed as their own flavors (and nasty aftertastes, of course…)
I think diet soda tastes disgusting. I can’t drink it, it turns my stomach. I can never steal a sip of my boyfriend’s drink which sucks cause he always drinks diet. But I also don’t like sugar sodas like the throwback Mountain Dew, I like the HFCS ones.
I don’t drink tons of soda anyway though. Water, skim milk, and beer are my main drinks.
Um, for the same reason fried chicken, double bacon cheeseburgers, and banana splits exist. They taste good, there’s a huge market for them, and people buy them in droves.
Mmmmm. Banana split! I’ll be back later…
Add me to the count of people who can always taste the difference. Even Splenda has a nasty aftertaste for me.
Soft drinks, as the name implies, are substitutes for alcohol. So instead of asking for a hard drink they asked for a soft drink like Coca-Cola.
Man, isn’t it always like that? Start a thread on a subject you’re passionate about and really want to get a lively discussion going, it sputters for two days before dying forever. Fire off some mundane, pointless question that just came to you one day for whatever reason, there are 48 responses by the time you get back to it. Ah, well…
First off, I just want to say how genuinely surprised I am that a lot of you not only can taste the difference with sucralose, but actually hate it. As far as I’m concerned, that pretty much nails this whole thread shut. I’m aware that aspartame (BTW, thanks for the spelling correction! 
) is far from perfect, I just argued that now we have something nearly as good as the real thing. Apparently we don’t. (Oh, and anyone care to dispute modern decaffinated coffee tasting just as good as the regular kind, go right ahead.) Look, I can barely choke down a Boca patty, and even the best veggie burgers don’t taste within a football field of a ground-beef American classic, I’m just saying that I never saw as huge a leap with even Diet Coke, much less Coke Zero.
What really sparked my interest in this was the multitude of products, many of which have been me for my entire life, disappearing with startling speed. Vinyl records (yes, I know they’re still being produced, but not where I live). Tapes. Incandescent light bulbs. Floppy disks. Manual car windows. Single-blade razors. Videotapes. Dial-up modems. In every case, the change was made because new technology came along that was clearly better, didn’t come with a host of new drawbacks (like the Zip drive) and (very important, now) cost about the same, in some cases less.
I figured it’d be the same with soda, since…well, it’s really simple, it’s supposed to be refreshing and taste good. Of course there will always be a market for vintage sports cars. Taste. Style. Tradition. Status. Of course turkey bacon will never replace pork. Um, hello, different meats? Different tastes in meat? Of course brooms weren’t killed by vacuum cleaners. Hell, the frickin’ noise alone makes this a non-starter. (I’d call ice cream a borderline case, but I’d certainly have no problem explaining its enduring popularity.) In all these cases, the new product is an alternative, not a replacement. Which is apparently what Splenda has become.
Nonetheless, technology marches ever on. Don’t be surprised if SirRay’s wish eventually becomes reality.
Anyway, thanks for the enlightening responses. No, really, that’s what keeps our democracy strong.
P.S. - Didn’t know about the pain/discomfort/nausea issues either. The worst that I ever get is bloated. Honest.
Responses, responses…
Marley23 - Ever drink something with sucralose (Coke Zero is one)? I’m not discussing aspartame here. I acknowledge that it wasn’t quite as awesome as the Nutrasweet shills made it out to be.
bump - No, but I have eaten Boca burgers, as mentioned before, which are absolutely dreadful, and I’ve had the misfortune to eat 99% fat free chili, which I think plain rice cakes are a massive improvement over taste-wise. I have eyes and ears (and a tongue, obviously). Don’t assume too much.
Cazzle - I work in public housing. Someone needs to fill out a pre-printed rental agreement every time a new tenant moves in, and all our purchase orders are made on pre-printed forms as well. We get new tenants frequently (especially now) and have to keep a whole office well-stocked. Printers are useless for forms. Handwriting, even if it were permitted, would be far too slow. What would you recommend?
LouisB - Oh, come on. Procreation. Giving pleasure to another. Forming bonds. Rite of passage. Love. Lust. Domination. Submission. Bragging rights. Heat of the moment. Peer pressure. Rebellion. No comparison whatsoever.
Kozmik - I kinda suspected that, yes. Incidentally, I’ve only ever head it called that on television. Where I live, it’s “soda”, or even simply “beverages” (with the “alcoholic” being left off implying nonalcoholic).
It’s still possible to buy a typewriter? From a proper store? Brand new? The mind boggles.
As long as government agencies and other organizations continue to produce forms with carbon paper, offices will continue to need typewriters to fill them in.
It tastes the same to me, but I consider it a pointless perversion of nature, so I still refuse to drink it. 
I’m really not sure what you mean here. The only thing I think you can be implying is that there is some “healthy” alternative to ice cream that tastes pretty much the same, or close to the same? To what can you possibly be referring? Fat free frozen yoghurt? If so, have you had the taste buds burned from your tongue?
You haven’t met enough graduate students. The food groups of graduate students are soda, chocolate, pizza and chinese.
We used to have an MnM dispenser in the lab we called Mr Skittles because that was the other thing we’d fill it with… and before anybody freaks out about the safety issues, it was a computer lab. And the other students would “steal” your computer if you left to go eat, but not if you’d gone to the bathroom or to get soda.
Now I’m confused. Inspired by this thread, I just got my first can of Coke Zero. It says “aspartame” in the ingredients list. According to Wiki, the only market in which Coke Zero contains sucralose is mainland China, and it contains aspartame in all markets. As far as I can tell, the main difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke is that Coke Zero is a sugar-free version of the regular Coke formula, whereas Diet Coke uses an entirely different formula, closer to “new Coke”.
Personally, I found Coke Zero to be much closer in taste to regular Coke than Diet Coke is, but still noticeably different. I would drink Coke Zero if no regular Coke were available, whereas I would rather go thirsty than drink Diet Coke.
Well, lots of people (the majority probably) drink some type of soda and also have strong opinions as to their likes and dislikes - I for example prefer Pepsi and Sprite, will drink Coke or Dr. Pepper, but dislike the taste of their Diet equivalents and also experience a nasty metallic aftertaste with those diet versions.
Digression - Well, I think CFLs are NOT clearly better than incandescents, as they cost more, do not currently produce the same light (more a slightly ‘off’ light as compared to incandescents), and worse of all, still seem not to have have the instant-on factor that incandescents (even the new CFL I brough from Home Depot a few weeks ago has a noticable ‘warm up’ factor to get to full brightness - this limits their usage around my house to about 3 or 4 places, everywhere else like stairs or halls or bathrooms I need light full-brighness NOW! Luckily, manufacturers are working on much improved incandescant bulbs which can meet the energy-efficency requirements, so it may well be CFLs will be the ZIP drive of bulbs until we get the Flash Drive equivalent of lights (perhaps LEDS, perhaps something else, I don’t know)
I hope sooner than later - much sooner - and I’d really like a ‘drop-in replacement solution’ - turn off the HFCS injection nozzle, turn on the replacement left-hand sugar equivalent injection nozzle, tastes about the same, costs about the same, lasts on the shelves about as long - yay, we’re done, and we also get to shut up the jabbering foaming-mouth parrots who insist we must tax soda and juices (well, I suppose all natural juices would continue to have sugar, since sugar is natural and all that).
When our whole family gets together there are only 4 of us (out of 12), who don’t do diet. Evidently, that’s not enough to trouble with buying just one 1liter for us to share. I always volunteer to bring drinks just to be safe.
Sugar tastes good. Fake sweeteners don’t, to most people (myself included).
Also, “empty, useless calories” is a gross oversimplification. Your body can make use of simple sugars perfectly well, deriving energy. The problem is the total lack of other nutrients, so if your whole diet is simple sugars that would be bad. If you consume simple sugars moderately, and remember to brush your teeth, what’s the problem?
The root beer I had as an after lunch treat just now was delicious, and, as long as my lunch was reasonably nutritious (which it was), it’s not going to hurt me in the slightest.
In theory, sure. It hasn’t happened, yet.
Lots of people. Myself, included among them. Your use of “outdated” is totally fallacious, the premise of your OP fatally flawed.
So, what you’re saying is they aren’t “empty, useless calories” because they contain calories, but are otherwise empty?
Coke Zero is nowhere near as good tasting to me as regular coke; but the taste is less noticeable if the Coke Zero is REALLY cold. Once it starts to warm it starts getting worse. Splenda is okay…I put it in coffee or tea sometimes, but I still like the real thing better. I’ve tried to bake with it, and it really DOESN’T seem to behave “just the same” as sugar.