Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I've lost count of the number of times various people have told me one sweetener or another is "just as good as sugar" or that I "can't taste the difference". The folks at the clinic have urged me to switch away from sugar, and at least one nurse there has used "you can't taste the difference" and "you just have to get used to it" in the same conversation. (Uh, if I couldn't taste the difference, would there be anything to "get used to"?) My mother tries to give me things sweetened with sucralose, saying that I can't possibly taste the difference. And I've heard many people parrot to me the Splenda advertising tag that "it tastes just like sugar because it's made from sugar."

People trust an advertising slogan over the evidence of their own senses?

Look, yogurt is made from milk, but it doesn't taste just like milk. Whisky is made from grains, but it doesn't taste just like bread or breakfast cereal. (Heck, you can sample two different whiskies made from the same grain and discover they taste absolutely nothing alike.) And sucralose does not taste just like sugar. Okay, maybe it does to some people, but please stop telling me what it tastes like to me. My brain receives nerve impulses from my tongue; yours does not. (Some of you should be very grateful for that, as I know that some of the things I enjoy the taste of, various friends can't stand. But I can see how other folks tasting what I taste might be useful for leverage: "Be nice to me, or I'll bite into this habanero pepper!" Or, "If you don't stop that, I'm going to drink a wasabi daiquiri!" Heh.)

I never got around to deciding whether to worry about the dangers of cyclamates or whether I'm one of the people who gets headaches from aspartame -- I could never stand the tastes enough to consume meaningful quantities. Splenda is better than most of the others (for my taste buds), I'll give it that, but I still find the aftertaste unpleasant. The same goes for stevia (a plant extract). And I really don't like the idea of going out of my way to eat things I don't like. Yeah, if I'm really really hungry and the only food that'll be available for the next several hours is okra, I'll deal; but to deliberately make things taste bad and then work to "get used to it" strikes me as being ... wrong. I believe that increasing the amount of beauty and pleasure in the world is a moral good -- oh, there are other very important goals, some of which trump "increase beauty" when they conflict, but increasing beauty does make my list of Things One Ought To Choose; it's not something I consider morally neutral[1] -- so making nice food taste bad rubs me the wrong way even when I can easily see the long term health benefits. (If you prefer the taste of one of the artificial sweeteners or really don't have a preference, more power to you; for you, replacing sugar with something else isn't evil.)

So, for example, instead of switching to diet root beer, which tastes foul to me, I've mostly switched to lightly-flavoured seltzers, which merely taste different. If I didn't like those, I'd have to keep looking; fortunately I find them pleasant. (Unfortunately, they cost more than cheap root beer.)

But even when I do want the sweetness, all is not lost. There are sugar substitutes that I can use, depending on the quantity and what other flavours are present. Why, the just-complained-about Splenda itself works sometimes: if it's below a certain concentration, I won't notice it. That level is not enough to sweeten my morning coffee the way I like it, but the same happens to be true of stevia. And, importantly, the objectional aftertastes of sucralose and stevia are sufficiently different that if I use half-enough stevia and half-enough sucralose, I can make my coffee pleasant. (I'm also drinking it a little less sweet than I used to, but it's still within the "I like this" range, not in "I'll put up with this because I have to" territory.) And on Christmas, my mother gave me some apple pie made with sucralose that was very nice -- it was much less sweet than most people make their pies, but I liked that aspect because it let more of the appleness of the apples come through, and created a cool interplay between sweetness and tartness. When she told me it was made with sucralose instead of sugar I could detect the sucralose taste when I paid attention, but if I don't notice it without specifically looking for it then it doesn't count as making-it-taste-bad. She sent some home with me, and I quite happily enjoyed it over the next couple of days. (I know I've had other baked goods containing sucralose and found them palatable as well, but I don't recall at the moment which ones were okay and which were icky.)

So my main gripe here is not that Splenda is evil per se, but rather that it Really Bugs Me when people repeat the advertising bogon that "it tastes just like sugar". No, no, it really doesn't. If Mom had tried to make that pie as sweet as some commercial pies, using sucralose, the resut would have been abominable.

The same goes for the various sugar alcohols, some of which I find unpleasant when I can taste them but can be used below my 'notice this' threshold, and others of which I like when used in ways that work for my sense of taste. There are some candies made with xylitol that I like better than nearly-identical versions made with sugar! And, yes, there are also some xylitol-containing foods that taste noticeably wrong to me. In general, xylitol is the least-objectionable sugar substitute I've found so far (though I'm not sure it would taste right in coffee). Alas, it seems to be the least common. (I can deal with small amounts of sorbitol, but I tend to notice it early; I can deal with more sweetness from maltitol than from sorbitol before noticing objectionable overtones -- I don't know whether it's a greater or lesser quantity because I haven't gotten around to looking up the relative sweetness of the two chemicals.) Of course, there's the laxative effect of the sugar alcohols, which can be a problem if one consumes more candy than planned -- for me this seems to be more of a factor in chocolate than in hard candies.

So I'm willing to make changes to my diet for health reasons, including eating some of the things I like less often or in smaller quantities, and looking for healthier things-I-like, but I'm not willing to make my food taste bad. Better to eat something entirely different than to ruin something I enjoyed and then try to get used to the ruined version. Merely tasting different is okay, but bad is, well, bad.

And don't try to tell me two things taste the same when I can so easily tell them apart. Telling me that you can't taste the difference is fine, if it's true; telling me that I can't is kind of bizarre as well as being factually incorrect.

[1] So I'm basically making a hedonist argument here, but whether I'm technically a hedonist depends, I suppose, on whether I see those other moral goods that take precedence over beauty and pleasure to be inherently good and inherently more significant than beauty, or merely as worthwhile sacrifices/investments to achieve a long term increase in overall pleasure worldwide. I'll have to think about that some more, but it's probably worth an entry of its own.