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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   4629 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 28, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Is there anything actually wrong with Coke Zero? and other similar no calorie sweetened beverages?

Coke Zero is my preferred caffeine. In the first few months after each of my kids was born, I would drink a 2L bottle per day. I decided to stop because of the risk of tooth decay. The real-sugar drinks are much worse for teeth, but I'm pretty sure the acid from the carbonation is also not good, especially since I was drinking the coke without any food. (It's not hard to find random studies showing carbonated water is bad for teeth, but I'm not sure how much stock to actually put in them.)

I'd be interested in seeing the studies on carbonated water being bad for teeth. Coke zero still has added acid, so it's certainly worse for teeth than carbonated water.

Carbonated water is also naturally acidic, though a few orders of magnitude less acidic than citrus fruit juices or cokes.

If you're even remotely possibly an alcoholic (who enjoys cola mixed liquor drinks most of all), it goes down easier and might even taste better once you're used to it. Cherry coke zero and bacardi are cheap, fucking your life up is expensive.

Hah this seems like one of those "suffering from success" types of problems.

Also what is your flair referencing?

Quoting an early South Park episode Helen Keller the Musical, which I chose along with state flag because of a few different threads where my state has come up.

No. I read through the literature and reviews of it not that long ago, and was overwhelmingly convinced that it's safe, without any significant downsides to speak of. Of course, nobody studied coke zero in particular, but rather studies on artificial sweeteners like aspartame.

https://dynomight.net/aspartame/

That's a good review if you want to read it up yourself.

Drink the nectar of the gods, and consider yourselves safe from sugary sin or calorific clap.

I think what makes it appear suspect is simply who feels the impulse to drink calorie free sodas. It's just correlation, not causation.

As a wise man once said:

I've never seen a thin person drink diet coke

What is he fucking blind?

Probably was true back in the day when diet drinks were niche and only fat people drank them. Nowadays I can hardly find coke with sugar anywhere

There's an additional sugar tax in the UK, so it can be impossible to get non-diet options here at times. Even when you do, you pay extra.

It tastes like alien cat piss, it has a bunch of spooky chemicals and there's absolutely no reason to drink it when there are many better alternatives.

What are these alternatives?

Tea (green/black or dozens of other varieties that exist), coffee, water (including flavored ones if you're into that), juices if you can find a good fresh one. If you want something more fun, beer. In a restaurant, I usually drink water or iced tea (unsweetened) unless it's a social event where I'd get some beer or wine if it's fancy. Sometimes carbonated water (in Europe they love it, I occasionally get some though not a huge fan).

I've read that at least one of the fake sugars still causes blood glucose instability (because the body tries to produce insulin for it) but I don't remember which one. It also definitely sweetens your palate, so it takes more sweet to taste sweet so you might end up craving sugary junk more.

This is so real. When I got off added sugar drinks, after a while I discovered there are more tastes than "MOAR SUGAR!". And in fact, a lot of things have their own tastes which don't benefit from MOAR SUGAR. Which also unfortunately made about 90% of US sweets completely un-consumable for me because it's a gustatory equivalent of being tied up to a biggest meanest loudspeaker at a heavy metal concert. You can't do subtle tastes if people are addicted to MOAR SUGAR.

I also feel the same way about salt in a lot of US food, although there are definitely times the body just wants MOAR SALT.

Same, I gotta say that IMO a lot of this just boils down to industrialized food targeting the lowest common denominator, which is to say that sweet and salty tastes in particular tend to be ramped up in most store-bought food items in order to enhance its appeal to the mean human palate.

I actually find it much more of an issue in small-town restaurants, the kind you'd go to on a roadtrip stop if you wanted to avoid a chain. Recall once stopping off at a BBQ joint in the Central Valley (not necessarily a mistake, there are good ones) and my sandwich was like eating a salt shaker. Same with a fried chicken place in the coastal South that all the locals raved over. Though I did recently eat a bag of store-bought popcorn and it was so salty I had to put chapstick on for the next two days to heal my lips.

Yep, why bother with creating complex tastes if you could just hammer the basic receptors and sell 100x? The problem is once it starts, all other manufacturers have to do the same or die (or survive on meager earnings from rare freaks like myself, while their competitors are making billions).

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