I thought I had finally found a healthy drink I liked with no artificial sweetness and they had to go and fuck it up

      • digger@lemmy.ca
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        8 days ago

        I have yet to find a low calorie sweetener that doesn’t bother my digestive system. My wife, who lives on diet Pepsi, doesn’t believe me.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      Have we applied the same scrutiny to HFCS or refined Sugar itself? Or does sugar get a pass because it was the first plant processed for its sweetness?

    • 0oWow@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Might not be artificial, but it doesn’t look natural in sweetener form:

      The process of extracting stevia -

      Dried stevia leaves are subjected to purified water first. Then followed by a precipitation process with ferric chloride and calcium hydroxide to remove non-soluble plant materials & other impurities and follow filtration.

      Then the leaf extract goes through an adsorption resin, which is used to trap the steviol glycosides of the leaf extract.

      Afterward, wash the resin with ethanol to release steviol glycosides and decolorize the resulting solution with activated carbon to remove the colors in leaves, and then concentrated by evaporation.

      Again, go through the process of decolorization, filtration and spray-drying. The spray-dried product is then combined with similarly processed additional extracts, dissolved in ethanol and/or methanol, crystallized and filtered. Finally, after further processes of crystallization, filtered and spray-dried to obtain pure stevioside.

      Taken from here: https://foodadditives.net/natural-sweeteners/stevioside/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-1949

    • naticus@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      That’s precisely why I use it in my coffee and have for many years. However there’s a big difference from one brand to another I’ve found. Sweet Leaf stevia drops are the only kind I’ll use now.

        • YamahaRevstar@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Added sugar is considerably worse for you than any zero calorie sweetener. Don’t give me that IT’S CHEMICALS bullshit either. Aspartame is one of the most tested food additive world wide and it’s not found to be unsafe.

          • thejml@lemm.ee
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            8 days ago

            Aspartame gives me headaches. Like “I can’t interact with people” headaches. I’ve tried it a few times and it’s always directly afterwards.

            That said Stevia gives me a reaction like I had 5x the same amount of sugar, so I just have to remember if I’m adding it to something don’t use much or I’ll be hyper and then crash terribly. But at least I don’t get headaches.

            Sugar gives me no problems if I have it in moderation. I generally drink water, but if I have a soda, I have one and I’m done. It’s a treat, not a way of life. Drink water people, it’s actually good for you.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            8 days ago

            It is all really terrible for you in the long run. There are phycological impacts of sweetness.

            Also drinking anything heavily flavored is problematic for your kidneys and heart. A little coffee or tea isn’t a problem but if you start drinking Soda as a water replacement it will come back to bite you.

            I do agree that terms “artificial”, “chemicals”, “non GMO” and “organic” are BS. Ultimately it is more phycological than anything.

      • nixfreak@sopuli.xyz
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        8 days ago

        You do realize manufactures have to wear gas masks when pouring in that junk right?

      • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com
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        8 days ago

        It’s interesting to read people’s reactions to stevia. I don’t seem to have the same reactions/aftertaste others point out.

        I much prefer stevia over other sweeteners. I wonder if there is some sort of cilantro type thing going on.

        Edit: Turns out stevia can taste different to other people!

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      Not only that, but unless you can guarantee that a significant portion users will recycle those aluminum cans, they are significantly more energy intensive to manufacture compared to single use plastic bottles.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Here in Cleveland, we used to just put all trash, no recycling, on the lawn. Then in 2008 or so, they put out a recycling innitive. Each resident had to pay $10 per family (so duplexs would buy 2 per house), and they’d get a blue bin. You put the recycling in the blue bin, and a seperate truck picks that up.

          Sounds great right?

          Welll…in 2020 or so they found out the 1st truck would take your black bin regular trash, and the 2nd truck would take your blue bin recyclables, and then BOTH trucks would drop off in the same pile, in the same landfill with zero recycling done.

          Since that was discovered I see a massive 90%+ dropoff in blue bins. Not only have people lost faith in buying blue bins at all, but most people now use their blue bins as 2nd regular non-recycling trash can.

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    8 days ago

    The unsweetened tea fight is a losing battle. The only way to get it is to make it yourself.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    8 days ago

    So, having a pre-chilled and conveniently-available product can be nice when you’re away from home, but if this is for at home, have you ever considered just, you know, making a pitcher of your own drink with whatever you want? Maybe take a Thermos of the stuff chilled or iced if you’re on the go? I mean, if you want agave as your sweetener, then you can make a drink with just agave and then tweak it to however you want. Food-grade citric acid is a preservative – I have a bottle in the pantry. You can purchase all sorts of flavors.

    Like, if you buy a premade good, then you can benefit from the R&D done by the company, but if you have extremely exacting demands that you feel no company is making, you can rage about it or just make what you want. In general, drinks have an enormous markup – I mean, you’re mostly buying water with a little flavoring and coloring – so you can have exactly what you want and it’ll probably be cheaper, too.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I take my own unsweet tea to work in a thermos. If that runs out, I drink the bottled water they provide.

      These are the same people that bitch about the plastic waste in Keurig pods.

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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    8 days ago

    i have no issue with stevia other than it tastes fucking awful. just a terrible aftertaste that makes me never want to consume it ever, in any configuration.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    This label part about plastics is what’s called green-washing here, and is illegal unless what they are doing is a very signifikant part of the price of the product.
    The labeling of what’s NOT in the drink is also under similar regulation, but I don’t recall what it’s called. But the fact that a “sugar” drink doesn’t contain fat is irrelevant and misleading.

    Whatever country this is from has bullshit regulation.
    The thing that is ABSOLUTELY NOT a problem is the Stevia which is clearly labeled!

    So the “mildly infuriating” part is completely misguided compared to the real problems of that product.

    Edit:

    Just noticed, Carbs 3%, sugar 6% incl. added sugar 12%.
    That’s impossible! You can’t have less carbs than sugar, since sugar is a carb. So these labels are probably illegal in EU on no less than 3 counts!!

    • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 days ago

      It’s a US label and the percents are % of recommended daily intake. So that’s 3% of your daily recommended carbohydrate intake, 6% of your daily recommended intake of sugar, and 12% of your daily recommended intake of “added” sugar. The recommendation is something like, no more than half of your carbs should come from sugar, and no more than half of those should be added during manufacturing (i.e. most of your sugar intake should be from fresh fruit, etc.). So the numbers do line up.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        In reality there is no recommended sugar intake. We can do perfectly well with zero grams of sugar every single day for a whole life, without it causing a single health issue.
        So the label remains nonsense.

        There is a recommended intake of vegetables and fruit, but not for sugar. Not by any factual based health measure.

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          8 days ago

          You would have a point if the recommendation was a minimum daily intake. It’s not. It is a maximum. A recommended limit that you should not exceed.

          The USDA recommendation is that sugar should make up no more than 10% of total caloric intake. The percentages you see are based on a 2000 (kilo)calorie daily diet.

          That recommendation is perfectly consistent with your assertion that “we can do perfectly well with zero grams of sugar every single day”.

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      8 days ago

      The labeling of what’s NOT in the drink is also under similar regulation,

      For consistency, the regulations on labeling requires listing quantities of all of those specific nutrients, whether they are present or not.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Not a significant source of saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol…

        Those are the ones that are illegal, not protein 0g.

        The fat parts are illegal because those are not normal content for that kind of product, trans fats are also regulated, and advertising that something is within regulation is illegal. Because it implies other products are not.

        It’s funny how some people can’t even spot the problematic parts when pointed out, because they are so used to them.

  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 days ago

    Before this picture I thought Liquid Death was literally water in a can.

    Had no idea they added stuff.

    • MelonYellow@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      Yeah the slogan goes “Don’t be scared. It’s just water.” So same here, I thought it was just water lol.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      8 days ago

      Stevia is not artificial you silly duck.

      Not to mention that while it’s OP’s money, at least in the US, natural and artificial sweeteners (or flavors) can be chemically-identical. I remember a bit…might have been from NPR Planet Money…on a substance that literally could be obtained either way, but some people thought that artificial flavors were bad, so there was a market for companies to go out and (more-expensively) extract the thing so that they could make the food they made say “natural flavor” rather than “artificial flavor”. The designation is just a function of whether you synthesize or extract the thing, the manufacturing process. It doesn’t say anything about the actual content.

      EDIT: Not the article I was thinking of, but same idea:

      https://health.wusf.usf.edu/npr-health/2017-11-03/is-natural-flavor-healthier-than-artificial-flavor

      All three experts say that ultimately, natural and artificial flavors are not that different. While chemists make natural flavors by extracting chemicals from natural ingredients, artificial flavors are made by creating the same chemicals synthetically.

      Platkin says the reason companies bother to use natural flavors rather than artificial flavors is simple: marketing.

      “Many of these products have health halos, and that’s what concerns me typically,” says Platkin. Consumers may believe products with natural flavors are healthier, though they’re nutritionally no different from those with artificial flavors.

      • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
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        8 days ago

        These are great reads. Thank you for the links!

        Also, thank you for paraphrasing one of them, because they helped pique my interest further.

        Appreciate you!

      • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
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        8 days ago

        I love how you say this, offer zero explanation as to why and just drop the mic.

        I’m not here to defend Stevia, and I could give two shits about it; I’m here because I don’t believe you, unless you please provide us all something to read, because we are done taking things people say at face value.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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          8 days ago

          It is marketed as somehow healthy when the reality is drinking anything with strong sweeteners is problematic. It offers a false sense of security. Instead of actually cutting back on Soda and junk food people switch to the low and zero sugar products.

          It is like switching from smoking to vaping. Sure it might be better but the problem still persists.

          • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            You can drink a zero sugar saccharine drink every day for the rest of your life and experience no problems from it whatsoever. It’s the most tested artificial sweetener in history and has been used commercially since the 1890s.

            People switching to the low and zero sugar products is a good thing. It is much healthier than people drinking sugary beverages - which is the alternative that that they replace. They do not replace water.

            Switching from smoking to vaping is an improvement, but not a fair comparison as vaping has been shown to have significant negative health impacts.

  • metaStatic@kbin.earth
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    8 days ago

    it has infected everything and it’s fucking awful.

    I’d be interested in finding out if there’s a genetic component to this, like people who taste soap in coriander, because I can’t believe any reasonable person would put this nonsense in anything they want to make a profit on.