Also almost 100 percent of soft drinks went from nice to absolutely disgusting at least in my opinion.
I’d seriously like to see some double-blind tests on how effectively people can tell the difference between artificial sweeteners and sugar.
Like, there have been some pretty damning studies on wine with double-blind tests that have shown that while people may well have a different experience with different wines, they tend to link it with price when they know what they’re drinking, and the desirability becomes pretty disconnected from price once the labels are out of the picture.
I can tell the difference between straight stevia and sugar, because that’s got a bit of a flavor. But for other sweeteners?
I don’t notice the difference between Diet Coke and regular Coke, and that’s one that people tend to say that they can, much less Coke Zero.
But, okay. Say some people legitimately can taste the difference between sugar and a specific sweetener.
I kind of wonder how practical it’d be for those mix-at-drink-time machines to let you choose not just the drink you’re using, but also the sweetener. Want aspartame, use aspartame. Want Splenda, use Splenda. Want cane sugar concentrate or corn syrup concentrate, use those.
I mean, it’s pretty common in the US to have several types of powdered sweetener for coffee, let the customer choose. I’d think that we could do it with liquid sweeteners in soda too. Hell, let people adjust how sweet they want the drink, if you’ve already gone that far.
Are you actually saying some people don’t get that horrible aftertaste because It’s very obvious to me and there’s no way to mistake it.
I was close to vomiting when I noticed it in “supposedly Normal” Pepsi recently that leaves coca cola as the sole one I think think hasn’t done it yet. When that’s gone I guess I’m stuck with water.
Diet Coke leaves a nasty metallic taste in my mouth, can’t stand the stuff. Coke Zero on the other hand mostly tastes ok to me, unless I’m eating chocolate & then it gets a similar nasty aftertaste to it as well. Nearly all other soft drinks are now sugar free & I’ve not found one I like anymore, some I’ve even spat out on initial sip as they taste so rank to me.
Thankfully I’ve grown to like sparkling water the past few years, used to hate it, & often have that instead if I fancy something fizzy.
Classic lemonade also still seems to be available with sugar, which is nice as an occasional treat…
I’d be interested to know how much of that is from reduced sales, how much is from products reducing the overall sweetness, and how much is the products being full of (controversially potentially worse) artificial sweeteners and other crap to replace the sugar.
Because most soft drinks replaced the sugar with artificial sweeteners… No real sugar allowed for the proles.
They didn’t mention how it affected overweight/obesity rates, which is what they aimed to tackle. Every research I found had problems in its modelling or just straight up speculative.
Plus they are not actually using the extra income for related programmes instead they include it in the general budget, which is not nice…making it just a tax.
Although from a dental perspective there is no way it’s not working.
Why are other countries are not struggling with obesity rates is what I would like to know even without a sugar tax.
I just hope they are not planning to introduce a salt tax, food is already bland as is.
the guardian has messed up their headline a bit here. The paper they’re citing attributes a 9.7% decrease in children’s total sugar consumption to the sugar tax.
The “sugar consumption halved!” is more accurately: “free sugar from soft drinks only” dropped from 22g per day (pre-tax) to 12g per day (post-tax).
Considering “Children aged 7 to 10 should have no more than 24g of free sugars a day” is the recommended amount - a reduction from 22g to 12g from changes to soft drinks alone is still a big win