Looking at the ingredients of "De la Calle Tepache" it contains ERYTHRITOL, which is a sugar alcohol/artificial sweetener but does not count as "sugar" on the nutrition facts label. This is why it tastes "plenty sweet".
It's not correct to say that it's an artificial sweetener -- not all non-caloric sweeteners are artificial, and not all processed additives are synthetic. That is to say, erythritol occurs in the environment in all kinds of settings, where e.g. sucralose is artificial because it needs to be synthesized by humans in a laboratory.
To be clear, that is the only sense in which I distinguish artificial/synthetic and natural substances -- those words are heavily loaded now and carry with them all kinds of connotations to the point of not even being particularly useful, but if we're going to use them we should at least be correct!
>It's not correct to say that it's an artificial sweetener
And what does that matter for the context of this conversation? Honestly?
The conversation isn't about whether or not it's synthetic sweetener. It's about the total amount of added sweeteners in the product. Therefore, any sweetener, synthetic or natural, count toward this end, correct?
Does the erythritol in food products come direct from nature? Not according to wikipedia
> Erythritol is manufactured using enzymatic hydrolysis of the starch from corn to generate glucose.[25] Glucose is then fermented with yeast or another fungus to produce erythritol. A genetically engineered mutant form of Yarrowia lipolytica, a yeast, has been optimized for erythritol production by fermentation, using glycerol as a carbon source and high osmotic pressure to increase yields up to 62%.
So I feel like your specific wording is just as misleading as calling it "artificial".
Did they control for the fact that most non-nutritive sweeteners get consumed in a diet of highly processed foods, which are more likely to be causative of CVD than just the sweetener?
So similar to Coke Zero/Diet Coke.