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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1550 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?

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.

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