I am ignorant in this topic, but why do americans seem to drink soda( pop as they call in cinema) excessively ? I live in India and flavoured soda is considered luxury item here. We just drink water with everything, unless its a festive occasion or with alcohol. What makes soda so attractive that US customers consumes it so heavily. The only points I can think of is the cheap price and concentrated sugar which is found to be addictive.
There are a few reasons. One is that soda is marketed extremely heavily by Coke and Pepsi as a very normal drink to have all of the time. The other is that is pushed in restaurants a lot as it has a huge profit margin, similar to alcohol but you can have it as a child; relatedly children get a taste for it as its very sweet and sets people up from child hood. Another is that corn syrup is heavily subsidized, and is in food everywhere here, and very few families have a house wife cooking food from scratch these days. So processed food with sugar additives is normal giving people these addictions and cravings.
You don't need a personal chef to cook non processed food at home, not even a stay at home housewife of 60's. This is the most privileged thing I hear Americans repeating. All the raw ingredients are there at your supermarkets, cheap prices compared to your wages. I've seen it with my own eyes from visiting. It's just laziness and saving time, billions of people around the world cook at home from raw ingredients. They also go to work.
People are lazy and prefer to replace it with netflix which I don't have a problem with until people lie to themselves and others about the reasons.
I agree with this. A combo meal at McDonalds is $8 or $9 per person these days, meanwhile, a (relatively) healthy supermarket meal easily cooked on the stovetop in the time it takes to wait in a drive-thru costs $1 or $2 per person. I don't buy into the idea that Americans eat processed unhealthy foods because of their personal financial situation.
> a (relatively) healthy supermarket meal easily cooked on the stovetop in the time it takes to wait in a drive-thru
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with your overall point....but what drive-thrus do you use?
A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour. Prep, cooking, eating, cleanup. If it takes less than that, then it's probably a lot of pre-made/processed stuff that isn't particularly healthy in itself.
The only way I've been able to get around it with my work schedule is to meal-prep on weekends. Making stuff in bulk helps, but it's still 3-5 hours of my precious weekend used up.
You're doing it wrong. There's so many ways to cook a quick healthy cheap meal.
I cook 6 chicken breasts at a time, that way I have chicken for today and the next 5 days. It takes less than 5 minutes of your time to put chicken breasts on a sheet pan and then step away for 20 minutes while they bake in the oven. Then one minute to wash the sheet pan when they are done. There's 6 minutes of my time for 6 days of chicken breasts.
Then there's so many ways to use the pre-cooked chicken breasts. One day ill chop one up mix with mayo, and mustard to make chicken salad and apply to some toast. 5 minute chicken salad sandwiches.
Next day I'll chop the chicken Breast up mix with taco seasoning microwave for 1 minute and apply to taco shells with lettuce and tomato. 5 minute tacos.
Next day I'll microwave a chicken breast with some mixed veggies. 5 minute chicken and veggies.
Next day I'll microwave the chicken breast apply to some toast with lettuce,tomato, mayo. 5 minute chicken sandwich.
That was just some things you can do with a chicken breast. There's so many meals you can prepare in less than 5 minutes that is healthier and cheaper than anything you get going out to eat.
I used to cook chicken breasts whole until I discovered that cutting them up and then cooking them turns out way better. You end up cutting them up eventually, whether it's to put in a recipe or eat. But cutting and trimming 6 chicken breasts does take a while. The supermarkets are usually pretty good at removing the fat and icky parts, but there are still sometimes bits of gristle or even occasionally bone fragments. That said, it's well worth the extra effort.
For years I could never figure out how my favorite Thai restaurant makes the chicken in the Basil Chicken dish have such a great texture. Now that I cut the chicken before cooking, I get similar results. Now if I could only get the seasonings right.
But aside from that, your recipe ideas are excellent, and I do a lot of the same kinds of things. Chicken and veggies, usually done as a stir-fry kind of thing (and with a good wok, you don't even need to add oil, although I usually put a little in).
Another item I can't live without is garlic paste. I put that in almost everything, and my wife always gives me a hard time for buying so much of it, but I use it that much. Besides, we've had an agreement for many years: She doesn't like cooking, so I do most of it. And there are few things more satisfying than having your wife just raving about some excellent dish you've prepared (ditto the kids). That alone is enough encouragement for me to keep doing it, but I get to enjoy it as well.
Chicken breast is my go-to for easy meals, but lately I've also been using tilapia filets a lot. They're relatively inexpensive... for fish... and very easy to prepare. For a treat I'll use salmon filets or tuna steaks. I love both, but my wife really prefers the tuna.
I have a number of similar dishes based on ground beef, too, (like chili) but since that's been going up in price more than chicken, I've been using it a bit less these days.
Pork loins and chops are another good protein that's easy to cook, and not too expensive, but chicken often wins because it's the cheapest of all.
FWIW, I don't go out to eat that often. I don't cook much either, except for weekend prep as mentioned. When I don't have something prepped, it's usually wraps with tortillas, baby spinach, and some sort of meat and cheese.
(Long story but I live in a complicated environment with a bunch of people who never clean up after themselves, so the kitchen is basically unusable since I refuse to clean their messes.)
Also, "some mixed veggies". Do you use frozen? I like frozen veggies, but they take a lot longer than five minutes to cook unless I'm just microwaving a steamer bag (and they never taste that good prepped that way). I much prefer fresh (and they're normally cheaper, monetarily, though obviously they take much longer to prep).
I eat 1 ~7oz chicken breast 6 days in a row. I'm currently working out daily and gaining lean muscle. Chicken is high in protein and low in fat. So yes, I consider that healthy. You don't?
The average American is eating corn, beef, french fries, and cheese for nearly every meal every single day.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour.
It's not hard to optimize for speed. White rice, beans and frozen veggies boil in 10-15 minutes and don't even require attention for the full timespan. Cleanup consists of putting things in the dishwasher. And I don't know why you would factor in eating, going to McD won't teleport it into your stomach. Time can be further amortized by making several servings, putting them in the fridge and warming them up in the microwave later.
We're comparing to fastfood here, not a high end restaurant course.
Get an instant pot (a relatively new "smart" pressure cooker). I've been introducing my in-laws to their instant pot and it's hard for them to comprehend how fast it cooks. Mashed potatoes, steel cuts oats, lentils, all in about 10 minutes. The pot cooks everything.
My go-to lazy meal is 1 1/2 cups of rice and beans, a few cups of stock, a cup of salsa, extra flavoring as desired, whatever veggies and protein I have around, all thrown in the pot for 25 minutes. Then I take out the pot and put it in the fridge. That will last two people a few days. Very little prep for a massive amount of food.
You can also make yogurt overnight for maybe a 75% savings over store-bought.
The other tip with the instant pot I’ve found is to put your food in a glass bowl on the steamer tray in the instant pot. This way you can add exactly the amount of water, and you don’t make a mess of the pot.
Cleanup for me definitely doesn't consist only of the dishwasher; my knives, wok, cast iron stuff to start definitely don't get put in there.
I have optimized what I do quite well, or at least I'm much faster than I used to be. But for example this last weekend, I made some stir fry in a large batch for this week's meals. By the time I left my parents' house (long story but I basically can't cook at the house I live in), I had used up three hours. That was prepping four bell peppers, an onion, garlic, cabbage, broccoli, and chicken, cooking them, and cleaning up afterward.
I'm sure I can speed my prep up even more, mostly with knife skills. But at this point, that's how it is.
I factor in eating because I clean up after I eat. Most of the stuff I make is best fresh out of the frying pan with very minimal resting time.
But anyway, I'm not here to argue. If cooking at home works for you in 15 minutes, fantastic! I can't do that, it never works that quickly. I was mostly wondering how the parent poster's drive-thrus were so slow that they could cook faster because where I live, I never spend more than five minutes in one.
Cooking time heavily depends on the dish. There are recipes optimized for time consumption - if time is a priority, you could use those. Sometimes we just put potatoes in the pressure cooker, peel afterwards, and season with some oil and spice - takes 10m max. That’s the healthier alternative to fries from McD. A keto meal will take longer, but at least in my area there‘s no takeout option for keto anyway.
I feel like this doesn’t optimize for enjoyment. Like shit this is what I ate when I was a broke in college. Are y’all not miserable eating this? At that point in my
life getting taken by my parents out to somewhere mediocre like Olive Garden was heaven.
No we're not miserable. In fact having home cooked healthy meals daily makes me feel better than ever. When I go eat fast food now I feel noticeably worse than I normally do.
You are what you eat. Eat garbage fast food, and you will feel like garbage. And your body slowly accumulates all that garbage.
Traditional dine in restaurants are usually just as unhealthy as eating fast food as well.
It's actually shocking to me that garbage food has been normalized to the point where eating healthy is "what I ate when I was a broke in college." and that we must be miserable eating healthy.
I don't think they are necessarily saying that fast food is healthier, just that you aren't going to get too many people excited by claiming that cooking for yourself from scratch is easy and doesn't take much time. Then you go on to describe a meal that consists of white rice and boiled vegetables.
You're right. Cooking takes a lot of time, and cooking good healthy food that isn't boring can be expensive. I'm sorry, I can't live on vegetables and be happy. I cook plenty of chicken, fish and red meat as well. Although my appreciation for vegetables have gone up considerably in the past couple decades. The first lesson I learned is that canned vegetables are awful. Frozen is much better. Now I feel that frozen is awful (well, for things like spinach, broccoli, carrots and cauliflower anyway, corn and beans are fine). Now I only like fresh veggies (except for corn, frozen corn is fine). But fresh veggies don't keep long. There's a Lotte about 20 minutes away that has about twice as many different kinds of produce as most markets, and at about half the price, but that's a long way to go for every day shopping. I'll get fresh veggies at Giant or Target, but I don't like paying so much more.
I happen to love cooking, so to me it's relaxing. My wife doesn't like to cook, so I do most of it. But even still, as much as I like doing it, there are definitely days when I don't feel like all the work. And if I'm going to put the effort into making stuff, I want to make something good, and often something new, and that takes a lot of time.
And while brown rice is much better than white rice. If you want white rice, go with basmati. It tastes much better, cooks faster, and is hard to screw up. I don't understand why people use any other white rice. There are tons of other kinds of rice that are worth exploring too. They all have much more interesting flavors and textures than plain old generic long-grain white rice.
No, we’re not miserable. That’s just the media environment playing mind tricks on you to get you to buy things you don’t need so you don’t miss out on the montage of joyous people and half-naked bodies playing and frolicking on the sunny ocean beach with refreshing, ice-cold, bubbly, intensely colored sugar water.
Yo that’s super depressing if you’re buying your time back just to watch TV. Do you just assume that people don’t have friends, hobbies, side projects?
Sure, people have those. Friends to go out with to spend money, because that’s the way to socialize. Hobbies that require buying more non-essential things, and places to keep them in. Larger apartments to accommodate everything. Side projects to keep you busy while the world goes to shit.
So are you saying you don't have friends, you don't go out to socialize, you don't have hobbies, you don't do any work besides what your regular job pays you for, and you stay home in a small apartment and eat mostly white rice and boiled vegetables?
I don't believe your assessment of most peoples' priorities in life is helping you very much in convincing them to adopt your worldview and way of life.
Didn't optimizing for enjoyment get the US into this obesity thing in the first place? Maybe let's not do that so much?
Like just season stuff well, even boiled veggies
Unless we are talking about the kind of restaurants that are difficult to get a reservation for, then I think you are confused about what creates status in American culture.
Going through the drive through at McDonalds certainly will not raise your status in America.
This hits home for me. I really enjoy cooking but I’ve basically given up on weeknight meals that aren’t either leftovers from when I cook for fun or something prepared.
Like it is genuinely the most out of touch privileged statement but I have the money and am absolutely willing to buy the time. $30-70/wk (less the cost of groceries) to gain 8ish hours of leisure time and more variety than I would ever bother with is a no brainer experience at this point in my life.
I agree with this if your single, but if your a family every meal outside is 4 times the price and the time to prep the meal at home stays almost the same.
How much time do you spend driving to the drive-through, queueing up at a drive-through, making your order at the drive-through, waiting for your order at the drive-through, receiving the order from the drive-through, and then taking the order from the drive-through home before you eat it?
Add up that time over the course of a week and see how much time you waste on convenience.
You can cook a lot of inexpensive and healthy food in less than an hour. Protein, veg, complex carbs. Get a wok and do some stir fry - you can make a meal in literally 5 minutes then.
> Get a wok and do some stir fry - you can make a meal in literally 5 minutes then.
I own a wok and stir fry is my go to meal- I can’t make meals in 5 minutes. I take the time to cut vegetables/protein, then clean up afterwards. And if you’re going from pre-cut frozen it takes more than 5 minutes to thaw???
I agree that stir fry is a fast easy meal but I really disagree with this exaggeration of its speed. It makes the argument disingenuous.
It's similar to saying fast food is fast because you get served in 5 minutes, but don't count the time you spend in your car on the journey there and back.
People pick up fast food on their way home from work. The time that takes is only the difference in travel vs the most direct route (could be negligible) plus the time spent waiting in the drive thru. On the other hand, a lot of recipes online or in cookbooks completely ignore the time it takes to wash and cut vegetables, meats, and clean up after the meal. Recipes quoted to take 15 minutes can easily take over an hour. Lots of people also don’t know how to sharpen and use a kitchen knife properly so they take even longer for simple prep tasks. It’s fine to say “well they’ll get better if they take the time to learn” but they may not have time between multiple jobs and looking after kids.
I love to cook, and I make home-made meals from fresh ingredients regularly, and it does take a lot of time. I will often spend 3-5 hours on the weekend cooking meals for the family as well, but since I find it relaxing and fun, I don't feel like I'm "losing" that time. Well, usually. I do keep some frozen meals or other similar stuff around because I don't always have the time or sometimes don't feel like making something fancy.
On Wednesday, I made a stir-fry with boneless chicken breast , broccoli, poblano peppers, canned mandarin oranges, canned pineapple, garlic and ginger paste. It took a little more than an hour for this "quick" meal. I should have chopped a couple of onions, but I was getting lazy.
After reading your post, I'm realizing that I spend a _lot_ of time chopping vegetables. I have a food processor from 25+ years ago, but I can't find all the parts to it. I think it's time to find those, or just replace it.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour
Cut some onions and garlic, some cabbage and perhaps some dried sausage, fry it while your rice is cooking. Dinner done in 20 minutes. Cleanup is done with a dishwasher, because I don't live in a swamp. Forgoing rice, it can be done far faster.
I personally compare cooking time to time to go out end-to-end. Even with fast food, you have to drive to the pickup window, wait for the food, etc. It’s easily 10 minutes and you have to do it 1-2 times a day, so 2-3 hours a week. I’ve had fast food joints take 20 minutes to make the food, too.
I don’t think most people analyze the cost like this and they probably like restaurant food more.
It’s like spending “just 10 minutes” on HN everyday, adding up to something significant by the end of the week.
Yeah cooking is really boring to me and extremely unrewarding as I live alone.
I wish I could simply but healthy meals for a few bucks. I mean I can outsource my laundry for 7€ a bag and get it washed, dried and folded the next day. Why doesn't it work like that with food?
There's takeaway of course but those aren't the healthiest of options. It's more a luxury special thing. I wish I could get a meal service like some old people get :)
Fwiw I do meal prep. The downside to it is refrigerated or frozen cooked food that you eat the same dish of for an entire week. The upside is that I get to cook and eat all kinds of world cuisine (some quite labor intensive), while still being quite alright on time spent cooking. So even though its microwaved leftovers, the very different flavor profiles that I get to snack on every week makes it up for me.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour. Prep, cooking, eating, cleanup
As you cook more at home, you get much faster at it. Especially for recipes you familiarize yourself with. It also becomes less of a chore as it requires less focus and you can do other stuff (listen to music/podcast, chat with your SO/roomates) while cooking.
Are you kidding me? No it absolutely does not. I make every single one of my meals in less than 15 minutes including cleanup time. I have been doing this for 10+ years.
It would be at least a 15 minute round trip to the drive thru from my house and would cost 5x as much and be 10x less healthy.
My most common lunch is a salad that takes all of 5 minutes to chop the vegetables. My most common dinner is a bowl of steamed vegetables that takes seconds to throw in the microwave, and a baked potato that takes seconds to put in the toaster oven a half-hour ahead of time. Oatmeal or eggs for breakfast take five minutes or less too.
Unless you really work incredible hours, like a 16 to 24 hour medical shift or something, citing time as a reason not to prepare food is either looking for an excuse or way overshooting on the complexity needed.
Time is valuable whether you work 16 hour days or 2 hour days.
Wasting it on mindless things like chopping vegetables or washing pots and pans is of course a choice you are free to make, but it is a foolish one in my view.
It's usually about 2x the time to clean up after a meal than it is to actually prepare it, in my experience. The cooking is easy, but cooking makes a mess of the stove, of the pots and pans, of the utensils, et c.
I‘ve never cleaned up longer than 5 minutes after a meal, and I‘m cooking 1-2x a day for a family of four. Cook just one dish, ideally in a single pan/pot or in the oven. Get a pressure cooker for one-pot-dishes, ideally a smart one with auto-shutdown. Get machine-washable utensils. Get a self-cleaning stove (who cares about the mess anyway). Coated pans can just be rinsed with a soft brush and dried immediately (only smelly stuff like fish needs to be soaked).
Privileged, certainly. I take exception to the "laziness" accusation though.
We all have a finite amount of time on this planet, and replacing menial tasks with things that are interesting or enriching should be considered one of the more positive things one can do for their own life. It's like what they say about being rich/wealthy. Many people (I blame media mostly) think about the luxury items and lifestyle that one can purchase, but the real win is that fact that you don't have to anything you don't want to do ever again. You can choose exactly how you are going to live your life.
I don't personally believe life has a purpose or meaning, and I've become content to just wander the world finding interesting things until the end of it.
Since the edit timer has passed, I didn't intend to imply that cooking is only ever a menial activity.
The word came to mind thinking about coming home from a rough day at work and needing to put something, anything together to eat when you'd rather be doing literally anything else.
I'm not talking about a planned meal where some actual planning and effort went into a meal that the cook is hoping you'll enjoy, I'm talking about the results of "i'm tired and hungry and I need to make something and I'm hating the entire process" kind of meals.
The kind of cooking where you mechanically put something together without much thought because you're at the end of your rope for the day.
Obviously such a concept expands well beyond "cooking". Replace that with car maintenance, lawn care, programming, writing, etc. People enjoy different things, and would prefer to replace those activities they don't enjoy with something else.
Being able to is privilege, but I (personally) draw a hard line at calling that laziness.
Optimizing your time so that you can live your life the way you want to is a great idea. I daydream of having a personal chef so I can spend more time reading, studying, or any other activity that brings meaning to my life. But let's be honest, most of that time that people are freeing up with Uber Eats is spent scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.
Cooking food that is good for your body is not menial - it's central to living. Many people these days (myself even relatively recently) might choose a TV dinner so they don't miss any of that critical episode of House Hunters rather than spend 20 minutes throwing together a stir fry from raw ingredients. It is a lazy choice.
All I'm seeing from your comment is insulting OP's desire to not spend time cooking, and shaming it as being lazy. You don't even bother to back up your claim that it's not menial. Is shame really all you have to bring to the conversation?
I think they just meant it's uninteresting to them. I know how that feels. I really hate cooking myself. It's just so hard getting regular healthy meals another way
That's what I meant. The "menial" adjective was more describing something that is uninteresting to a person that is either basic and mechanical in the simplest form. As someone who loves good food, I am well aware that good cooking takes skill and effort. The meal made when I get home from a rough day at work and would rather be doing anything else is rarely an example of that.
I made some seasoned rice, a cucumber salad, and some sesame seed encrusted seared Ahi the other day. It was delicious and healthy, but it took 2 hours to put together, eat, and clean up after. That's not something I'm going to have the desire to do every day.
OP was (at worst) saying that cooking is menial. Not a comment about a person, and not a particularly negative descriptor. The person I replied to then indirectly called him lazy and made an insulting bad-faith assumption about how OP spends his time. The reply is pretty clearly an ad hominem.
I did not imply anything about how OP spends their time. I was referring to how I used to spend my time, which is much more clearly implied in that I refer to my own history of bad habits.
The evidence is massive and drastic that the eating habits of the majority of Americans are killing us. Maybe approaching 50 is making me care less about insulting sensitive internet randos than with helping people understand the consequences of poor eating habits and the fairly simple way one can change. Sorry for caring.
Not being willing to feed your sole human body properly is the definition of lazy in my opinion. It's purely an opinion, as is the opinion that doing so is menial, so there's no "backing up the claim". If someone is insulted by my belief that humans should be willing to spend time feeding themselves, so be it. My point is to encourage healthy behavior, not to insult.
Some meals are so easy to cook that you could actually watch the TV while cooking, only looking away for a few moments, usually while cutting ingredients. (Then there are other meals where such approach would most likely result in burning the meal.)
It kind of comes down to wealth and the average American is significantly wealthier than the average Indian (or average a lot of countries). Wealth affords you time for things that you care to pursue rather than things you have to. For an American this translates to a lot of people not spending much time in the kitchen.
It could perhaps be perceived as laziness when you deride whatever replacement someone chooses over basic chores they’re no longer responsible for but really this is you conflating leisurely activities as lazy.
I personally enjoy cooking but not everyone does and them choosing to pay to not have to do that is their choice.
"Privilege" is an interesting word. If I were Indian or Chinese, I would feel privileged to have been raised in one the world's greatest food cultures instead of eating spaghetti and mac 'n' cheese like an American my whole life.
Kids don't choose what their parents feed them, and that's how culture is imparted to the next generation.
This is a very broad statement. It's likely true in some cases, but access to food is wildly different depending on where you live and how much you make.
Consider these individuals (not meant as an exhaustive list of archetypes):
1. A high-income American who lives in a large city, owns a car and/or can afford grocery delivery
2. A middle-income American who lives in the suburbs and has access to a grocery store, but is price-sensitive when it comes to food
3. A low-income American without access to a car, who lives in a "food desert" in a large city and does most of their shopping at a bodega/corner market
4. An American who lives in a rural area without a grocery store for several miles
The way these people engage with food is wildly different, and only those in the first group could be rationally considered "lazy" if they chose processed food.
If your goal is simply to feed yourself and your family, you're likely going to optimize more for calories-per-dollar than you are than for freshness. When compared to processed food, fresh produce is actually incredibly expensive.
>You don't need s personal chef to cook non processed food at home, not even a stay at home housewife of 60's. This is the most privileged thing I hear Americans repeating
I think you are manufacturing your own argument here - no one said that they had to eat at a restaurant, have a personal chef, or a 60s housewife to eat well?
I think you've misread something, the parent post specifically mentioned personal chefs. Not trying to manufacture anything here and I give you the benefit of doubt.
The hours that you save not cooking meals add up. One hour a day spent cooking all three means (conservative estimate) is a lot when you have roughly 5 hours outside of work and sleep (likely less if you have a long commute). With access to outside food also cheap, there are other priorities to focus on. I don't live in the US, but cooking for myself only made sense after I started meal prepping.
My mom had a job. When she came home she still cooked a meal for her family. With vegetables.
The real truth is that a majority of Americans are now overweight. Unhealthy lifestyle has been normalised to a point when non fat kids who don't eat pizza for lunch will be bullied.
This is a tragedy that needs to be addressed but is not even close to non fat kids are being abused by fat kids now in America.
While the picture for adults is much worse, still only 42.4% of American adults are obese. A great tragedy that needs to be addressed but a “significant” majority of Americans are still at a healthy BMI.
Not sure what a google search for "2021 High School America" is supposed to prove. Its just a collection of photo's of beauty pagent winners and athletes...
Then we are getting localized results differences. I spent a few seconds scrolling down those links and there are dozens of group shot photos of dozens of American school children. It’s anecdotal evidence showing that the majority of American children are not obese which you can see in those photos with your own eyes. If you don’t like anecdotes it’s followed up with the actual population level statistics from an authoritative source.
Idk if “cooking from scratch” is something of privilege but my entire extended family and my wife’s entire extended family all cook “from scratch” most of the time unless we’re dining out. Anecdotal but I’ve known very few people/families who rely solely on take out/prepared meals for their sustenance.
A ton of fast food to fast casual places offer it with meals so people just drink it. I usually get unsweet tea instead (no it’s not the tea you are thinking of). Mexico consumes the most Sodas and beats the US despite having a much smaller population.
Most people I know who actually buy soda and bring it to their home either don’t drink alcohol or coffee. Plenty of Indian’s drink tea and there are probably street vendors who sell sugar cane juice or fresh squeezed fruit.
Everyone has their vices. Lots of people chew Paan and betel leaf but you’d never hear about it in the US.
In Mexico, there's also the fact that soda is often the most easily available source of clean water. When I was in rural Chiapas and Guatemala ca 1992, I think I drank very little that wasn't soda during that time.¹
1. Because the glass bottles were fairly precious by local economic standards, soda would be served "to go" in a plastic bag with a straw and a rubber band to keep it closed.
I don't like the blandness of water, if you want a first-person perspective. I consume a lot of diet soda, probably 8-10 cans a day. I'm always drinking something; if it's not soda, it's green tea, or gatorade, or coffee. I always need to be drinking something and diet soda is... well, something.
It's not much of a decision point, I don't really think about it in terms of expected value or return on my choice, diet soda is simply the answer to the question of, "What are you drinking?"
And despite articles like the submission, there's no real observed downside to this choice (I'm not obese, and have never been obese, so this article doesn't really apply to me), other than potentially what the carbonation could be doing to my teeth, and as long as my dentist doesn't seem to have any concerns (she doesn't), I persist.
No judgment is meant here - I am always so curious about people who think water is bland. When I'm thirsty, cold ice water is the best tasting thing on the planet to me.
I enjoy the taste of diet pop, but I also find myself reaching for it sometimes out of sheer boredom rather than thirst. If I drink some water and I find it bland, to me that's a sign I wasn't actually thirsty.
I don't think there's anything unusual about reaching for a soda as a treat for its taste. But in terms of pure thirst-quenching - damn does water hit the spot.
Mostly it's acclimatization, I think. If you have sweet stuff all the time, it doesn't taste all that sweet anymore, and everything else seems bland.
But there's also genetics. Some people spit out stuff like "omg, that's too sweet! yuck!" I eat a pretty spare diet these days and try to eliminate sugars and other additives, and still, sweet is good. I cannot put together this concept, "too" sweet. My sister doesn't like the taste of red meat, never has. People are just different!
Given your list of beverages, it sounds to me you might be subconsciously self-medicating with caffeine :). Myself, I'm constantly drinking either black tea or diet coke, all day long. I only drink water as last resort. I've been like that since childhood. It only recently occurred to me that I'm always settling on drinking choices that supply me with stimulants, indicating a potential deficiency problem.
Drinking water excessively is often an indicator of illness eg diabetes. Other reasons exist. The "its a hot day" reason is better than most but cold non-sugar drinks are usually more refreshing.
I don't think these people drink soda because they're thirsty. They drink it because they enjoy the taste and it's something to do, it's almost a small form of entertainment. As a result they're never really thirsty in the first place.
It's also what you're used to. There was a time when I would drink a lot of soda, but then I made an effort to switch to just water (and coffee). I almost never crave soda now.
A soda stream might change your life. It's an amazing device to have. Hope you drink enough water to keep yourself healthy and your skin looking fresh.
> I live in India and flavored soda is considered luxury item here.
I worked for a B-School program which looked at growth opportunities for Cola in India.
One of the challenges were lack of electricity in large parts of the country. Even those who had electricity did not get it for 24x7. Those who had it uninterrupted could not afford to buy a freezer. This prevented the whole appeal of cold drinks that are not cold. Coca Cola and Pepsi invested heavily in refrigeration technologies as they mass imported cheap fridges and offered them for free. But electricity being government controlled remains a luxury in India. Coca Cola and Pepsi did crazy things to solve this problem including creating tie ups with ice makers who supply ice slabs for special events to brine based coolers than can keep things cool for 12 hours.
The results however were stunning. From 2016 to 2020, India has doubled the per capita consumption of cola per year to around 88 bottles. I think it is fair to assume that the ceiling for this number is around 1500 bottles per year because both USA and Mexico consume that much soda. Given the income difference between both countries I think that is an upper bound.
USA has 30x of India's per capita income but only 20x more soda consumption. Which makes me think Indians are going to hit that 1500 bound much much sooner than expected.
Note:
Some of our research results were fascinating and counterintuitive.
People preferred Coca Cola because it was "healthy" to a locally produced freshly squeezed sugarcane juice. The reasoning was that while the juicer center does not even have a food department clearance and is unsanitary, people had more faith in soft drink manufacturers quality control. Ice mixed with sugar cane juice was often transported via two wheelers, kept on the road and smashed into smaller pieces with a hammer.
When people were convinced that the sugar cane juice was produced in extremely clean fashion people preferred it over coke and were willing to even pay more than coke.
Companies like Paperboat in India have come into existence from these sort of insights.
American who's kicked a soda addiction -- it's super cheap, tasty, has some caffeine, and it's everywhere (gas station, convenience store, supermarket, advertisements), not to mention you have to walk by a soda fridge near the checkout lines of most retail stores. I only drank diet soda but you become so desensitized to it that water is 'boring' in comparison you don't reach for it as easily
Advertisement. Coca Cola spends billions every year in advertising. Nobody would drink this otherwise.
What I don't get is how they can get away with it. I mean people are getting crazy over companies like Facebook but junk food companies get a free pass for some reason. Most Americans are even unable to see the link with obesity rates.
When I was a kid and I'd visit my Dad he always had 'pop' around, and it was just something we'd power through without thinking. I'm not sure if I even thought that it was bad for me in a concrete way. It was just super sweet and felt 'fun'.
When I was 19 I worked at a tech company with unlimited pop available. The 15lbs of additional weight caused me to look at it a whole different way, and broke that habit pretty fast!
Now the only time I have Coke is after a huge endurance event, otherwise it's just way too much.
In the American South, you're likely to hear "coke" regardless of whether it's actually Coke, or even cola-flavored. It's "pop" up north, and "soda" in the northeast and southwest (plus a couple of pockets near Milwaukee and St. Louis, which would otherwise be "pop" territory - fascinating stuff).
Whenever I would visit family in Louisiana, it was pretty common to go to restaurants, and even at places that exclusively served Pepsi products, asking "what kind of Coke do you want?"
Yep. Coke is every carbonated sugar drink. You have to get all the way to la croix for it to stop being a coke. South-Eastern USA aka "The American South"
It's just culture. Some cultures eat a lot of rice, some drink a lot of vodka, some eat a lot of fish. Probably a mix of marketing and cultural taste like most things.
Soda is highly subsidized in the US, it is a consequence of US gov subsidizing corn syrup, so on a ratio of wages to prize sodas are very, very, very cheap, and in a country with few public bathrooms or public fountains, the easiest way to have a drink while on the go used to be sodas
These days it is more common to ask for water, but even then, that will be bottled water and the prices can be similar to soda
Are we talking about the same US? I don't live there anymore, but I'm always surprised by the high number of indoor fountains in publicly-accessible buildings (as well as many parks and outdoor locations) there. For instance, every library, shopping mall, or larger store seems to have one near the bathrooms.
Meanwhile, in some European countries, for instance, outdoor fountains can be more plentiful which is fantastic in its own way, and indoor options are much less common. In others, neither outdoor nor indoor options exist so one is forced to find a public bathroom to use the faucet.
In some other countries, both public bathrooms and water fountains can be very rare, which unfortunately leaves no viable option.
Soda isn't really subsidized. Yes corn is subsidized but the main cost of soda is advertising, packaging and distribution, the flavor and syrup (or in the case the sweetener) costs nothing.
I can tell you that for me personally, it’s a way to get a small bump of caffeine. I’ve learned to drink more tea in the last few years, but having strong bitter receptors make coffee a flat out no.
Several people I know who grew up drinking pop will say they "hate water". Drinking water for them is boring or like a chore. The local water here is even highly ranked among the US as a whole for good taste, so it's not that our water is actually bad. I do recall feeling similarly in the past. At some point I got a nice metal water bottle and started carrying it around and drinking water, and I grew to enjoy it. Time away from pop and energy drinks for a while also made it more obvious how gross my mouth feels after drinking some. My tongue feels coated and sticky for hours, my teeth sometimes seem to feel weak. I imagine in the past this was something like my normal state. I didn't know what I was missing.
It's hard to convince people to change on this. They'll get an attitude like you're some health freak trying to hook them on a diet. Even my parents have a favorite pop each and will drink 2-3 a day.
Caffeine probably plays a large part as well. Most of the people I have in mind don't like or consume tea or coffee at all, because they don't taste very good (especially when you're used to pop).
It's normal to give to children due to marketing and it has not 1 but 2 addictive ingredients. Sugar && Caffeine. I was addicted to soda as a teen and it was very difficult to quit I had huge cravings.
It's such a good question! And all the answers here are "it's cheap" or "I'm used to it" or "I only drink the sugar free version"... Why is there no self reflection? Everyone's getting pested by theses corporations. "I don't like the bland taste of water." wtf is wrong with you?!
Some people in the world have to walk miles to get water! And we could have it from the tap. Just drink it from the tap!
Seriously, I thought people were smart in here, but all these answers...
>Seriously, I thought people were smart in here, but all these answers...
Shame culture is sad and pretty obnoxious. Does that a make you feel good about yourself, was that your objective? WTF do you care what people drink? Maybe do some self reflection on that.
> I am ignorant in this topic, but why do americans seem to drink soda( pop as they call in cinema) excessively ? I live in India and flavoured soda is considered luxury item here.
You answered your own question - because America is wealthy and Soda is cheap.
I'm in New Zealand and soda was definitely a luxury growing up. But here it cost 14.57 USD for an 18 pack, while for a 24 pack in the states it's 10.22 USD. So almost half the price.
I don't know if someone already mentioned this, but a big factor is that a bottle of soda costs the same as a bottle of water, and some times even less. It's absurd, because soft drinks are made of water, so water must be cheaper! Unfortunately, soft drink companies try to corner the bottled water market so it doesn't undermine their sales.
People who grow up on soda invariably think water "tastes bad", which has been the reason folks around me keep drinking it. I find it as mystifying as you.
Washes away the fat and caffeine helps with the digestion of heavy meals. Same reason Italians drink wine and coffee and/or smoke cigarettes. Making super heavy meals part of your _daily_ routine is hard without supplements.
Though the mechanisms they hypothesize about might apply to other artificial sweeteners.
I see sucralose in a lot of processed foods, especially ones trying to pretend to be healthy. It's a shame that it's hard to find unsweetened sliced bread in some stores.
I think the sugar ingredient in bread is partly to feed the yeast, but if you start looking at ingredients, you'll find sweeteners in almost all the packaged foods, from lunch meats to soup.
Plenty of bread is made with just flour, water, salt and yeast. Even the very cheapest own-brand sliced white loaf in my local UK supermarket has no sugar.
American bread has sugar because it's cheap and Americans like it.
FWIW, sucralose has also been linked to C diff infection.
It's worth maybe pointing out that this study was based on sucralose, just because it seems this sweetener is worth tracking separately in general. I don't really consume things with artificial sweeteners but sucralose is starting to become a concern of mine (eg for my daughter).
I should edit this by saying I was confused: sucralose does seem to affect gut microflora, but only trehalose, as far as I know, has been linked to C diff.
Still think it's worth keeping track of artificial sweeteners as they're not all the same in their effects.
I should edit this by saying I was confused: sucralose does seem to affect gut microflora, but only trehalose, as far as I know, has been linked to C diff.
Still think it's worth keeping track of artificial sweeteners as they're not all the same in their effects
Dave's Bread brand has a few low sugar or fruit juice sweetened breads. much healthier than other options. I have also found a couple of sourdoughs with no added sugar at all.
In a completely non scientific way, every time I've done some dieting to loose a bit of weight if I had any sort of artificial sweetener it would start craving sweets food.
So I think that this brain reward system still applies to anything that tricks your palate to think something is sweet.
"Grouping by nature of comparator revealed that NNS vs placebo/no intervention and NNS vs water produced no effect."
so like, there's a food craving, and then ???? you don't gain weight. who cares! maybe you eat more in the next meal, and then it's not clear this persists into a real caloric surplus.
This isn't novel research. A lot of it has to do with an effect where our bodies will secrete insulin in response to a sweet taste or even just something in our mouth. Insulin will decrease release of fat energy and turn on exclusive sugar metabolism. Without the expected influx of glucose, blood sugar will drop, making us hungry and stressed as we attempt to come back into homeostasis.
Some people underestimate the power of food cravings. The amount of willpower needed to overcome cravings as a result of starvation can be monumental. Some people have never experienced starvation level hunger in the first world. Some people experience it every day by choice.
Your brain will re-wire itself to think of nothing BUT food and how to acquire it. You notice colors associated with foods. Smell becomes heightened. I once smelled what the neighbor was cooking two doors down and felt an overwhelming urge to knock on their door. Commercials for food are endless. One time on a walk, a white-tailed deer walked by and I had the feeling of a NEED to run it down and kill it with my teeth.
Real hunger, experienced by people every day, is almost at the level of psychosis. Trying to hold a job, raise kids, keep a house, and have a relationship while starving yourself to not be fat is nearly impossible as it is. Artificial sweeteners aren't going to MAKE you eat. But they will make you even more miserable.
Most focus is on incretin hormones. (peptides from your gut) These are triggered by the taste of food which subsequently trigger insulin release. What is interesting is that these can even be triggered by smells.
>replacing sugar with NNS leads to weight reduction, particularly in participants with overweight/obesity under an unrestricted diet
NPR repeats the same old wives tales like you would hear from the guy next to you in line at Dunkin' Donuts but in a soothing posh accent to make you think you are an intellectual.
I was hooked on Pepsi Max in the early 2000s. A high pressure tech support role at an antivirus vendor was the perfect environment for me to blast through a 2 litre bottle on a typical work day. That habit almost broke me physically, ended up binging and had a mini nervous breakdown within 2 years. Not recommended.
1.5 liters of Diet Coke a day here, plus quite a bit of coffee and I'm also doing ok. No real signs of moderate or severe dehydration either, maybe mild, but very mild if so.
Same. I'm on caffeine free now but I haven't kicked the entire habit yet.
That said - it's much easier to drink just water now. No caffeine headaches and such. Can't actually drink the caffeinated diet coke anymore - get sick from it. Super weird.
Many potential side-effects might be invisible until it's already gotten to the point of causing damage. Think lung cancer in smokers that don't destroy the body for decades[0], or the amount of people with prediabetes that won't know until their blood glucose level qualifies them for a type 2 diagnoses.
That's impressive. I thought I needed an intervention because the other day I managed to drink an entire six pack of Pepsi Zero Sugar in one day. Maybe I shouldn't worry so much...
yeah, stress can do terrible things to your body, affect nervous system function, cognitive impairment, major stomach issues, affect the heart and its function, and on and on..
Tricking your body into thinking you ate sweet things does not sound like a winning strategy in the long run.
I heard a speculation recently from a science vlogger, I think he was citing a paper, but as a side comment to the fact that humans have taste buds elsewhere in our bodies, that it's possible that when the artificial sweetener is in your intestines, your body makes an effort to absorb the 'sugars' that it senses, but in the process ends up absorbing some of the ambient sugar in your GI tract that otherwise would have not been captured, or used by gut microbes, throwing the whole balance off in the process. So in effect sugar free foods still have a caloric cost from a diet perspective.
Then there's sugar alcohols, which are edible by bad gut microbes but not by you.
> Tricking your body into thinking you ate sweet things does not sound like a winning strategy in the long run.
What are you comparing it to though? If you're deciding between diet soda and water, then it's hard to make a health case for diet soda. But if you're deciding between diet or regular soda, then diet soda starts to look a lot better.
Look around. This whole thread is about how the tradeoff of artificial sweetener is worse than you think it is. In toto it's pretty bad in fact. There is no 'health case' for diet soda. The person who put those four words next to each other in your brain was in marketing, probably when you were still a kid.
There's a hedonic treadmill with sweets. If you stop consuming processed food with refined sugar for a while, the common complaint is that they are too sweet to drink. We have to acclimate ourselves to drinking soda regularly. Can you see how screwed up that is?
Artificial sweetener is trying to keep our unhealthy relationship with sweets but cut out the consequences (or rather, trade them for other consequences).
I'm not drinking less water because I'm drinking artificially sweetened soda; I'm drinking less genuinely sweetened soda. I have no illusion that my diet soda is better than water, but that seems to be what most comparisons are between.
And maybe some day I'll remove diet soda, but for now it's not competing with water; it's competing with soda, and I suspect it's at least an upgrade in that regard.
The key is to only drink it during a meal, and not outside of meals perhaps then.
The amount and kinds of artificial sweeteners in each drink could well be reduced and varied by manufacturers, but time and time again they choose not to, but if you look at the alternatives of water every time or drinks that are also very high in sugar on the inverse, diet drinks are a blessing for many people.
Buying stuff you know you shouldn't eat is just present you finding yet another way to screw over future you.
Also serving size matters. It's cheaper 'per serving' to get the larger container, until you are honest with yourself about how big your serving is actually going to be, and how much time and energy (and possibly money) it's going to take to undo.
Buying the single serving chips or the smaller cans ends up being cheaper for me, overall. A serving of fancy chips is a treat. A whole bag of them is just self-recrimination in a crinkly bag.
This is good advice for anything you crave, be it soda, food, you name it. The hardest part about losing weight for me is when my wife continues to buy junk food for herself or the kids.
Have you tried lifting weights? Maintaining muscle takes a lot of calories. If you eat too much, just turn it into muscle and there won't be any left over for your body to store fat.
Just want to add this here, artificial sweeteners are a blessing, specially for people with slower metabolisms. Food in the US is loaded with sugars, its nice to have a way to minimize consumption while satisfying cravings. You cannot argue that being obese is better than consuming artificial sweeteners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
The point of the article is that artificial sweeteners have been shown to cause cravings and make changes to metabolism. They may be causing obesity instead of helping people avoid it.
It has been known for a while that people who switch from regular soda to diet soda (and make no other changes) do not lose weight.
This is a crazy result given the calorie difference, so there must be something going on.
Somehow the body is reacting badly to the dissappoinment of not getting all the promised calories that it tasted. Either triggering cravings that drive people to make up the deficit elsewhere or causing the digestive system to change gear in some way.
It is now known that there are sweetness receptors in the gut, so this flow of what the body thinks is undigested sugar may make things go haywire. Anyway, it's not my field, but I find it interesting.
I think it's generally true that "people who do X (and make no other changes)" do not lose weight for all values of X except some very unhealthy things, and those unhealthy things are generally followed by rebound weight gain anyways.
Almost everything to do with weight loss verges on pseudo-science and the field is constantly flooded with misinformation from people peddling something. Focusing on weight loss as a goal in and of itself is thus pretty much always a road to pain anyways.
Worse, artificial sweeteners are used in animal farming to make animals gain more weight. This is due to a combination of factors, both increasing appetite as well as feed efficiency.
I drank soda throughout my childhood and really ramped up how much I drank when I got into college and finally had a bit of disposable income. At a certain point I was easily drinking a gallon per day. The thing that finally got me to stop was that I started getting throat ulcers every time I drank it. I'd been getting them for years up to that point, but much more sporadically. Once I stopped drinking soda, no more throat ulcers. When I need a carbonation fix I go for seltzer water now.
I don’t doubt that diet soda is terrible for you. I would however like to point out that the particular study cited had 74 participants. This seems a bit low but to me, though I realize it may not be the only study showing some similar effects. I’d love to see a larger study.
For a long time it was illegal to list calories on beer in the US, and the number of people who assume that Guinness is at the high end of caloric density rather than down near the lite beers is just astounding. I didn't believe it, and I've either told a number of people or got to back someone up when they did it. Almost nobody believes you.
It's the malt I think that convinces you that this stuff must be like a beer shake.
I really wish more 0% beer was available in the US, and at reasonable prices. I've been buying Athletic Brewing stuff lately and it's good, but at $11-$12 for a six-pack it's priced the same as mid-tier microbrews.
I can buy good local micros for a few dollars less, so the NA pricing feels a bit wasteful. But I haven't been drinking alcohol lately, so... this is my choice if I want something beer-y tasting.
Luckily enough, I think we're near the beginning of a wave of alcohol-free beer coming to market in the US. Sam Adams "Just the Haze" and Brooklyn "Special Effects IPA" both came out in the past year and are pretty solid.
I'm really hoping so. I tried that Sam Adams and found it a bit meh, it was also sufficient. Weirdly, ALDI has a NA German beer that's actually pretty all right, and like $7/sixpack.
I'm really looking forward to NA Guinness.
There definitely are good boutique NA beers out there, they are just SO pricey.
> The "diet" in diet drinks may be a false promise for some soda lovers.
Now that's a surprise! Seriously - okay if you like the aspartame taste of your diet coke, go ahead. But if you actually think diet coke is "healthy" in any meaningful way - then I'm sorry, nobody can help you!
If you want to cut sugar, but want something sweet, stay away from sucralose, splenda, aspartame.
Some good alternatives are stevia, monkfruit, and the sugar alcohols (xylitol, erythritol, etc). I don't especially like the taste of stevia, but stevia + monkfruit blends aren't so bad.
Sugar alcohols, if overdone, can screw up your GI tract.
I keep a bowl of fruit in the house at all times, and it's time to go to the store when it's getting low. I make it easier for myself to get some fiber with my sugar than to make myself something sweet. It's not enough on its own, but it sure helps.
A whole personal pizza comes close, but typically the slices are under 300 calories. I haven't had a Costco pizza slice in a while, but aren't they enormous?
Not so much the food, but I am heavily addicted to Coke Zero. I tried on Monday to quit it after a 2 week focus to prepare and I failed within 2 hours. I have previously quit nicotine for example so it's blown my mind why I can't handle stopping this simple drink.
How did you fail within two hours? Was there still some in your home or did you unconsciously walk to the store and purchase more? Getting it out of your house is key. It's important to raise the friction to act on the vice as much as possible or else you will engage in it without thinking.
If its caffeine you are physically addicted to, I will say the withdrawal is probably just as bad as a nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine withdrawal seemed to hit much faster (for me it was within 15 minutes of my last hit of nicotine vs coffee I just needed it bad in the mornings), but other than that the effects of withdrawal felt the same to me between the two stimulants. In both cases, if you are able to deal with a terrible migraine headache and feeling underslept and sick and nauseous for the two weeks it takes to get through these symptoms (in my experience at least), you will have successfully quit. I have cut back my coffee to maybe 3-5 cups a week (after a long initial detox) and I haven't used or craved nicotine in years.
Seems like an addiction you have through mental/memory association or routine that has been created over time for you. If "Diet Coke" is still bearable for you, or even if not, try switching to that to disconnect the addiction within your brain, then perhaps it may be easier to quit. I am not a psychiatrist though, just a suggestion.
Do other drinks / sources of caffeine work to replace it? I know it takes a couple of weeks to get over caffeine withdrawal, during which you may feel really tired or get headaches.
The black label Coke Zero uses aspartame instead of saccharine, is strongly carbonated, and has a noticeable caffeine bite. Sorta similar to Barq's root beer, which is less flavorful than A&W and other competitors but has caffeine and was marketed with "Barq's has bite."
The newer version tastes a lot more like regular coke, but to get that flavor, it seems that it is meant to be poured over ice.
This article is nothing new, we've known this. Body sees sweet thing, releases insulin in anticipation, but there's no calories to process. And now you've just increased your insulin resistance.
I've done much N=1 testing of this proposition with a blood glucose monitor, and haven't found it to be true for me. I get a spike when I drink something sweet and sugary, but not when I drink something sweetened with sucralose, aspartame, stevia, etc.
Aren't you measuring glucose instead of insulin though? I might expect a spike in insulin after a spike in glucose, but the other way around doesn't seem as likely.
I'm not entirely certain myself if artificial sweeteners cause insulin spikes, but it's worth pointing out the difference in numbers between high and low blood sugar. Normal blood sugar is what, 90-100 mg/dl or so, while the diagnostic criteria for low blood sugar starts at 70 mg/dl. Meanwhile symptoms for high blood sugar start above 200 (or even sometimes 300) mg/dl. Presumably cravings for sugary foods kicks in well above 70mg/dl too.
Simply put a spike in blood sugar due to a sugary food is much, much bigger than the drop in blood sugar sufficient to trigger a change in eating habits. And that's before we consider the impact of non-insulin hormones on our behavior, such as Ghrelin, which won't show up on a blood glucose test at all.
Yeah this is straight up just false. Insulin is not released based on taste, that would be very problematic. Some studies have found very low levels of insulin based on taste and feelings of eating but that's it.
Cephalic phase insulin release has not been demonstrated based purely on sweet taste of liquids. Some studies show no effect, others find a very weak effect on the order of 1% of actually eating.
There's also some evidence that artificial sweeteners affect the composition of the gut microbiome [1], which could be more influential (over the long term) than the taste/insulin theory. See also: evidence that different sweeteners have different impact on gut bacteria, which could make it easier to test which effect is more significant.
The results are all over the place. Some articles says continuous low-dose aspartame has effects [1], others say that aspartame has other effects on quorum sensing [2]. I'm not in this area so I can't judge any of this work, I just think it's interesting.
People talk a lot about stevia, and it's prominently displayed on packaging, but then when I look at the ingredients, the sweetener is actually mostly sugar alcohols.
Is stevia ever used alone? If it's just a "fig leaf" so to speak, then perhaps the health effects of the sugar alcohols would be more relevant.
another similar thing is chewing-gums. Body starts chewing, produce more saliva, and some enzymes, but nothing comes down as expected. Or reversly, when food is not chewed, the body misses an important step
