I thought I had finally found a healthy drink I liked with no artificial sweetness and they had to go and fuck it up
Stevia isn’t artificial lol
But it tastes artificial and fucks with lots of tummies.
I think anything you’re not used to has the potential to fuck with your tummy
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.
I have the exact same issue! Haven’t met anyone else with the same problem yet. Really sucks that more and more non-diet drinks are containing some amount of artificial sweetener.
have you tried honey? Even just a drop or two will really add a lot of sweetness
Liquorice (there’s also an actual root, not just the confectionery) is very sweet and tummy-friendly, actually recognised as a herbal remedy over here for (mild) gastritis because antiinflammatory and antispasmodic (alongside helping with coughs and having some antibacterial properties) but too much will fuck with your blood pressure, avoid it if you have any issues there. A bit will probably be fine but a habit generally isn’t “a bit”.
There’s some medicinal teas over here which pretty much only contain it to taste better (otherwise makes no sense in combination with e.g. valerian). The stuff is actually sweet and pleasant, not a neutral but woody sweetness, not to be confused with North European liquorice confectionery where the predominant flavour is Salammoniac. Which are also very good… hey I grew up with the stuff, don’t look at me like that. Anyhow if you want a naturally sweet herbal tea adding a couple of shavings of the stuff should do the trick.
You’re thinking of xylitol which gets mixed with commercial stevia crystals to cut the sweetness
Yeah Stevia tastes like poison to me, super bitter.
Basically all artificial sweeteners taste like either bitter or nothing at all to me. So I’m really angry when I buy a product I’ve been buying for years and it suddenly tastes like a Nintendo Switch cartridge.
>:(
suddenly tastes like a Nintendo Switch cartridge.
Fuck. I know this smell. You just triggered NES and Super Nintendo memories in me. Never played Switch but I’m assuming they’re about the same.
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?
On the plus side, stevia isn’t artificial.
What is “artificial?”
It is all marketing BS
Generally, artificial sweeteners are chemically synthesized while natural sweeteners are grown and refined.
I used to grow the stevia plant in my garden.
Does that matter at all?
In reality it is all arbitrary. By that definition table salt is artificial and poison nightshade is natural.
Hey, you asked… I just answered.
Salt is also a poison
but “table salt” contains iodine, and that requires a refining brine which is an industrial process. Its natural but also not. When it comes down to it, lots of this is splitting hairs
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.
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
You don’t know how sugar is made, do you?
They don’t get simple chemistry is required to refine and purify stuff either apparently lol
Or agave syrup apparently
Yeah , it’s from an actual plant.
Stevia is DISGUSTING and by far the worst non-sugar sweetener. Aspartame is good in my opinion.
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!
Imo stevia is one of the best of the no calorie sweeteners, but since that entire category is absolutely abhorrent that’s sort of like being called the fastest snail.
And none of us can ever really know what anything actually tastes like to anyone else.
Because it’s subjective
I’ve had a fresh stevia leaf before, totally amazingly delicious. However i can’t stand it as a sweetener in drinks.
Stevia does have a bit of an aftertaste, but it’s fine for me in, say, coffee.
IIRC, the major limiting issue with aspartame is that it’s not heat-stable to the degree that sugar is, so there are a bunch of products that are made with sugar that you can’t make with aspartame, problem for baking.
kagis
Yeah:
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/aspartame-and-other-sweeteners-food
Aspartame is not heat stable and loses its sweetness when heated, so it typically isn’t used in baked goods.
There is no one alternative sweetener that has all of sugar’s properties, just without the calories, which is what people really want.
Stevia has the aftertaste. Aspartame isn’t heat stable. A lot of the sugar alcohols – like xylitol, which is really common in sugar-free candy – are laxatives, so if you eat that whole bag of candy, you are going to have horrendous diarrhea. You gotta use a patchwork of alternative sweeteners to replace sugar, based on the properties of a particular sugar use.
I prefer stevia to just regular sugar. I go out of my way when buying soda to get ones with stevia because they just taste better.
Why wouldn’t you just use sugar
If you are going to mistreat your body then go big or go home.
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.
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.
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.
Diabetes?
You do realize manufactures have to wear gas masks when pouring in that junk right?
OH MY GOD!!! MASKS!?! It must be rat poison!
People working with powders should be wearing masks.
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If I drink a lot pineapple juice, would it be considered artificial sweetness?
only for your cum
Unless it’s mixed with erythritol
The unsweetened tea fight is a losing battle. The only way to get it is to make it yourself.
What about tejava (spelling?)
This isn’t unsweetened tea either. It’s probably very sweet considering how high in the order agave syrup is
Stevia can only be added in the manufacturing process by a cyclone valve which is actually quite noisy.
“Death to plastic”
“Here drink from this plastic-lined can” (https://www.plasticstoday.com/business/liquid-death-may-murder-your-thirst-but-it-won-t-kill-plastic-no-matter-what-the-ads-say)
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.
Do most people not recycle cans?
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.
and then BOTH trucks would drop off in the same pile, in the same landfill with zero recycling done.
That’s not true, especially for cans. It’s more effective to sort trash at a central location than to have consumers do it beforehand. Aluminum recycling alone turns a significant profit. Glass is also profitable by itself.
Waste management companies should be paying you for your cans; if they are charging you for recycling, you should consider taking your cans to a scrap yard rather than leaving them in your trash.
I think you’re misunderstanding.
I’m not stating how recycling SHOULD work. I’m stating how the city of Cleveland DID (or rather did NOT) operate it’s own recycling innitive.
They sold you a blue bin for $10. And then for 12 years, unknown to the public, they picked up the recycleables, and didn’t recycle them.
It was a cash grab to get millions of dollars from residents, to perform a service that was never properly performed.
Bro. Citation needed.
My city started doing a similar thing. Their contracted recycling plants started rejecting the truck loads because they were seeing less than 40% recyclable content in the shipments. Lots of people overestimate how much of their trash is recyclable, and over-utilize the recycling bin.
Apparently the recycling plants will accept as low as 50% recyclable content in the load, anything under that they for a prolonged period, they start rejecting the loads.
So for a year our city was just taking the recycling bin loads to the landfill. Years ago most cities could just sell it directly to China, ship it over on enormous garbage boats, but even China has stopped accepting our nonsense.
Our city had to do a big re-education campaign, and send out new stickers for the bin lids, to get residents to put only recyclable things in the recycle bins.
It’s true, I have no idea what actually happens to my recycling after it’s picked up, but I guess I can hope…
It’s easier if you don’t hope. Less inevitable disappointment that way.
Where I live, every time you buy a plastic bottle, aluminum can or glass bottle, you pay extra 10 cents that you get back when you take them to the recycling (that every store is mandated to have, IIRC).
And do you do that?
Yes? Because every time we bring back a bag of bottles, we get about 10€. Would you rather throw out the 10€?
I also return mine but most people around me don’t seem to. You can often find them littering the streets or walkways or even out in the woods unfortunately.
Don’t know about other places with a deposit system, but in Finland 98% of aluminium cans are recycled. Seems to work pretty well
According to the actual Aluminum Association, only 43% of aluminum cans shipped within the United States are recycled.
The overwhelming majority of people recycle nothing.
As well, the overwhelming majority of recycling collection companies recycle nothing.
Before this picture I thought Liquid Death was literally water in a can.
Had no idea they added stuff.
Yeah the slogan goes “Don’t be scared. It’s just water.” So same here, I thought it was just water lol.
They have a few different products including plain water
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.
Stevia is FOUL.
And it isn’t exactly good for you
Why?
Makes your body think it got sugar but it didn’t
Further studies are required to conclude a direct correlation of artificial sweeteners with decreased insulin sensitivity.
It is still sugar and it has a impact. It us also common in soda and over heavily flavored drinks that are hard on your kidneys and heart.
How about drinking water from the tap? Much cheaper, not wasting cans, and healthy. If you live in a community with bad tap water, write a letter to your local water board, and buy a filtration tank you can put in your fridge.
If you must really have flavor, buy some of the powdered dehydrated lime or orange powder packets.
I presume you’re not from the US.
Many municipalities across the US do not have drinkable water, and many more do not offer public access to water fountains. Thus, bottled water is a huge market in the US as free facilities are not always available.
I’m Canadian and I legitimately cannot recall the last time I bought bottled or canned water. I bring my two 18.9L jugs to the store to fill them with filtered water for $5 and that’s the extent of my “bottled water” consumption. Elsewhere, I carry a metal water bottle I can get refilled anywhere for free.
Have drank tap water across the US for decades. Some municipalities are crappier than others, but a fridge filter tank takes care of those places.
Absolutely, I’m not stating that the US’ water is undrinkable, simply that enough municipalities have poor quality or non-drinkable water that it’s easier for companies to market water bottles to people.
Stories like Flint, Mi. go international, and its crisis lasted for a really long time, despite being mostly the exception (see the other commenter’s Wikipedia link). And public access water fountains are not a thing in many cities, leading to an even greater perceived scarcity by consumers.
My point above was that enough municipalities have a drinking water quality problem to drive sales of water bottles across the country, the US’ drinking water is not bad across the world stage, but probably worse than most western European countries.
The solution should be either a water filter, or a filtered water dispenser from a refillable jug. Not disposable water bottles.
I’ve quite literally drank Flint water. Not for a humble brag (far from it) but I really hate that they became some kind of trope. They have needed help for decades and could have recovered faster if America ever cared about people. Good people there. Shitty America management. It’s like they keep them down for the Internet points.
As for municipal water. Stop by Altoona, Iowa sometime and drink their water. It’s just so terrible. Ground water full of stuff they can’t filter at scale. I don’t hate them for it, it’s what they can suck out of the ground, for maybe a few more years before it becomes brine.
It is hard to produce drinking water that is safe, and also tastes good. Is my global point.
Personal filters can improve that. Otherwise, buying water just leads us to a human future that is by far the worst reality we could ever impose upon ourselves.
Edit: TL;DR: bad tasting municipal water isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just the reality you have to work with at the time.
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.
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.
Stevia is not artificial you silly duck. And it’s more sustainable to grow than the fucking sugar you hypocritically enjoy every day. Get over it.
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.
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!
To clarify I don’t necessarily have an issue with stevia itself it’s the fact that it is usually mixed with erythritol which is bad for you.
usually mixed with erythritol
Your photo shows no evidence of this.
is bad for you
I’m fucking done reading shit on the internet where people say things and expect us to believe them at face value. You made this statement, and it isn’t my burden to provide evidence to prove you correct, you will.
Please provide everyone here a link for us to read and change our minds.
Not the guy, but https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9028423/ was an interesting read.
A quick glance on google about Stevia might lead you to this link, but the preview shows “Results showed that stevia might lead to microbial imbalance, disrupting the communication between Gram-negative bacteria in the gut via either the LasR or RhlR …” which seems bad, until you read the rest of the good things that Stevia is supposedly doing.
Plus, the text behind that ellipses is “However, even if stevia inhibits these pathways, it cannot kill off the bacteria.”
So this might just be some good old misinformation on google’s part.
Edit: I mean to say that google is intentionally misleading people about Stevia.
Do you have any actual data showing that reasonable amounts of erythritol is worse for you than any alternatives?
erythritol
Shouldn’t that be on the label if it was in there too? How can you assume it is when it’s not labelled?
IDK what shitty country this is from, but it’s for sure an illegal label here (EU), on at least 2 counts.
Stevia is incredibly misleading as a product
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.
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.
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.
I’m sorry, you didn’t actually think this beverage was healthy to begin with, right? Lol
For starters, agave is one of the highest fructose-containing sweeteners out there. Our bodies can’t use fructose directly, so most fructose metabolism occurs in the liver where it’s converted to glucose. Overconsumption of it may promote metabolic syndrome even more than glucose.
The only two sweeteners I use are date sugar (whole powderized dates), and rarely molasses. Unsweetened teas might be an acquired taste for some, but after getting used to it, they generally add plenty of sweetness on their own.
This entire thread had been really disheartening
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.
Drink water
Why do all the 0 calorie sweeteners have to taste like a dead hobo’s arse?
