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Comment by dmritard96 | Hacker News Reader

As a diet soda addict, I was always surprised that soda companies haven't just started pushing diet drinks more. Until the additives are deemed to be carcinogenic, the health benefits over regular soda are plain as day light and they can really mitigate the public health push back they are getting on their nondiet brands/varieties.

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Instead the soda companies have switched to making crazy amounts of money from bottled water, and also increased their sales of “sports” drinks, “energy” drinks, iced tea, fruit juice, etc.

cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dr_Pepper_Snapple_bran... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_PepsiC...

Sports/energy/tea/juice drinks are sodas. Chemically, at least. Are they a loophole in the soda tax laws?

No idea about the tax situation, but the popular perception is that iced tea, juice, etc. are seen as more virtuous than soda.

Isn't there a large body of research that show unexpected negative effects of diet drinks?

EG: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...

Yeah and it may alter your gut bacteria in terrible ways http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweeten...

Most of the research I've read has said the opposite.

http://examine.com/faq/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/ http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3496

No. You're actually wrong. The verdict is still out on diet soda and artificial sweeteners. This[1] is required reading.

[1] - http://examine.com/faq/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/

I always had thought that I could never get used to the taste of Diet Coke...but I worked at a place where the fridge was entirely stocked with Diet Coke and I grew to be just fine with it. I guess it's an affirmation of the saying, "you like what you eat, not eat what you like".

My favorite drink these days is the Dr. Pepper Ten...Diet Dr. Pepper has always been my favorite tasting of the sodas, but "Ten" purports to fit a good amount of sweetener in 10 calories...which to me, is just about as good as 0.

But yeah, I feel if they pushed diet sodas half as hard as they did regular drinks, the companies would eventually make a stable profit from it. But maybe it's too hard, institutionally, to purposefully cut into a profit center...in the same way that it was probably difficult for newspapers to try to compete with Craigslist because no ad manager would idly sit by and let his profit-making department be slashed.

I couldn't get over the taste, but I've found that bottled mineral spring water (sometimes flavored with lime or lemon) is a great replacement. It's zero calorie and no sweetner.

Why not filtered tap water? Most bottled spring water is bottled tap water.

Do you mean carbonated water?

Yes I did.

Humans like sugar, instinctively. MBA spreadhseets can't make that false.

AFAIK, studies show that drinking diet soda does not lead to weight loss, it seems to lead people to eat more. Though of course these studies might be bogus, as many studies in nutrition are. There seems to be a huge will to demonize artificial sweeteners, people are convinced that there can be no free lunch.

It's probably something to do with money - either they find that people are less addicted to them than the regular ones or they cost more to produce.

Or maybe it's just hard to change what people are already used to. Switching from sugar to sweetener can take over a week of drinking a beverage every day before your brain finally starts liking the sweetener more than sugar. It's much too long for people - "trust us, you'll like that in a week" doesn't really work as a sales pitch.

Doesn't mean companies don't try though; in my city (Kraków, Poland) there were already several Coca-Cola campaigns trying to switch people to Cola Zero. One of them included disguising cans of Zero as regular Coke, attempting to show people that they probably won't even notice the difference if they don't know they're drinking a sugarless coke.

And if you are making that kind of effort, might as well switch to something sensible.

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