4 ms·

Everything in moderation. If you only drink soda, you've got problems. If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. It's OK to pick a point somewhere i

Everything in moderation. If you only drink soda, you've got problems. If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. It's OK to pick a point somewhere in the middle.

jacob019 4y ago
I have fun drinking coffee, tea, and alcohol. I have no desire to drink sweet liquids. But point well taken, moderation is key to a happy life.
HellsMaddy 4y ago
Sweetened beverages, including no calorie, fall on the extreme end of the sweetness spectrum. If you consume such sweet things even in moderation, you are recalibrating your sense of sweetness. Personally, I’ve avoided all added sugars and sweeteners for a few years now. I used to find apples bland and boring, but now they taste like indulgent candy. The same goes for pretty much all fruit. I can taste sweetness in vegetables that I used to find bitter. Lightly cooked carrots, beets, squash are all deliciously sweet treats. The bottom line is that I get a lot more enjoyment out of “healthy” foods now. When I’ve recently tried “normal” sweets like cake or soda, they taste sickeningly sweet. However, I imagine that if I drank even a no calorie sweetened drink like Coke Zero “in moderation”, my sweetness scale would recalibrate and I would start gravitating more towards sweeter things, and be less able to sense the sweetness of mildly sweet things. The same concept applies to other flavor profiles. Salty, umami, starchy, fatty. Eating processed foods even in moderation reduces your enjoyment of whole foods and consequently makes you less likely to eat them.
- dannyw 4y ago
  How does watermelon taste for you?
- eropple 4y ago
  This is something that a lot of people claim with a universally authoritative tone, but it's counter to my own experience. I don't consume regularly candy, sweets, etc., but I do drink diet soda and zero-sugar energy drinks and when I (rarely) have fruits or make mixed drinks with fruit components they are really sweet to my palate. When I've cut diet soda out for long periods, fruits taste no sweeter. Cooked starches and tubers are already sweet-tasting and always have been for me; diet soda doesn't affect those, either. Moderation might not be fine for you. It seems to work for me.
  - pawsforthought 4y ago
    Not to contradict you at all, but worth noting that those fruits probably are extremely sweet, having been selectively bred precisely to compete with the sweetness of other foods people regularly consume. Something of a sugar arms race.
    - eropple 4y ago
      This is a good point, yeah--of course they're bred for it. That they taste similarly relatively-sweet irrespective of artificial sugar consumption is orthogonal to how much sugar is actually in them.
- brandonmenc 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't disagree with a lot of what you said, and I did the same "recalibration" on myself years ago. But a while back I started allowing myself to eat junk food again and it has not at all diminished my taste for "bland," natural foods. ymmv, but some (many? most?) people are able to drink a can of diet soda a day and not totally abandon eating vegetables as a result.
blitzar 4y ago
> If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. I have plenty of fun only drinking water thanks.
arisAlexis 4y ago
Drinking soda is no fun
kstenerud 4y ago
> If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. That's a very strange thing to say... It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing. When I first switched to water only 7 years ago, it was actually hard because I'd had a lifetime of flavor overload, and it takes awhile for your sense of taste to adjust to normality. American food in general is over-salted, and over-flavored. Eating most things there is like a punch in the face after eating normal food again (England has the opposite problem). Drinking carbonated water with a twist of lime helped a lot, and then after awhile I came to appreciate the subtle nuances between different water types. Tap water in San Francisco has a harsh overtone to it. Tap water in Western Oakland tastes a little muddy. Tap water in Vancouver and Leipzig is actually quite tasty. The best water I've ever had is hands down in the tiny town of Nagasasa in Japan. We actually dumped out all of our water bottles and brought 20 litres of the stuff back with us to Nagoya (where the tap water tastes terrible).
- semi-extrinsic 4y ago
  > It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing. It's only in the last six generations that water has supplanted beer (typically "small beer") as a beverage. Prior to that it was a dangerous thing to drink water unless you lived far out in the countryside.
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    I doubt this very much. Beer costs money to make, and very few people would have been able to afford it. We also see much more recently that 3rd world countries didn't do this, either. People drank water.
    - semi-extrinsic 4y ago
      Why doubt it? People made beer at home from barley and water and mugworth, it was decidedly not expensive. Today the Czech Republic is the country with the highest beer consumption per capita, at 140 liters per person per year. Germany clocks in at 99, and the US is at 72. In the late middle ages, the average in Britain was 300 liters per person per year. In 1830, Americans over the age of 15 consumed more than 31 liters of pure alcohol per year. If that was all in 7% beer, it corresponds to 1.2 liters of strong beer every day. Probably quite a bit was also in whiskey, which was cheaper than milk back then.
NullPrefix 4y ago
How much cocaine a day would still be "in moderation" ? I mean, we are talking everything, and everything includes cocaine too.
- UIUC_06 4y ago
  A fascinating question. Are you worried?

Everything in moderation. If you only drink soda, you've got problems. If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. It's OK to pick a point somewhere in the middle.

jacob019 4y ago

I have fun drinking coffee, tea, and alcohol. I have no desire to drink sweet liquids. But point well taken, moderation is key to a happy life.

HellsMaddy 4y ago

Sweetened beverages, including no calorie, fall on the extreme end of the sweetness spectrum. If you consume such sweet things even in moderation, you are recalibrating your sense of sweetness. Personally, I’ve avoided all added sugars and sweeteners for a few years now. I used to find apples bland and boring, but now they taste like indulgent candy. The same goes for pretty much all fruit. I can taste sweetness in vegetables that I used to find bitter. Lightly cooked carrots, beets, squash are all deliciously sweet treats. The bottom line is that I get a lot more enjoyment out of “healthy” foods now. When I’ve recently tried “normal” sweets like cake or soda, they taste sickeningly sweet. However, I imagine that if I drank even a no calorie sweetened drink like Coke Zero “in moderation”, my sweetness scale would recalibrate and I would start gravitating more towards sweeter things, and be less able to sense the sweetness of mildly sweet things. The same concept applies to other flavor profiles. Salty, umami, starchy, fatty. Eating processed foods even in moderation reduces your enjoyment of whole foods and consequently makes you less likely to eat them.

dannyw 4y ago
How does watermelon taste for you?
eropple 4y ago
This is something that a lot of people claim with a universally authoritative tone, but it's counter to my own experience. I don't consume regularly candy, sweets, etc., but I do drink diet soda and zero-sugar energy drinks and when I (rarely) have fruits or make mixed drinks with fruit components they are really sweet to my palate. When I've cut diet soda out for long periods, fruits taste no sweeter. Cooked starches and tubers are already sweet-tasting and always have been for me; diet soda doesn't affect those, either. Moderation might not be fine for you. It seems to work for me.
- pawsforthought 4y ago
  Not to contradict you at all, but worth noting that those fruits probably are extremely sweet, having been selectively bred precisely to compete with the sweetness of other foods people regularly consume. Something of a sugar arms race.
  - eropple 4y ago
    This is a good point, yeah--of course they're bred for it. That they taste similarly relatively-sweet irrespective of artificial sugar consumption is orthogonal to how much sugar is actually in them.
brandonmenc 4y ago
Honestly, I don't disagree with a lot of what you said, and I did the same "recalibration" on myself years ago. But a while back I started allowing myself to eat junk food again and it has not at all diminished my taste for "bland," natural foods. ymmv, but some (many? most?) people are able to drink a can of diet soda a day and not totally abandon eating vegetables as a result.

blitzar 4y ago

> If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. I have plenty of fun only drinking water thanks.

arisAlexis 4y ago

Drinking soda is no fun

kstenerud 4y ago

> If you only drink water, you're not having any fun. That's a very strange thing to say... It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing. When I first switched to water only 7 years ago, it was actually hard because I'd had a lifetime of flavor overload, and it takes awhile for your sense of taste to adjust to normality. American food in general is over-salted, and over-flavored. Eating most things there is like a punch in the face after eating normal food again (England has the opposite problem). Drinking carbonated water with a twist of lime helped a lot, and then after awhile I came to appreciate the subtle nuances between different water types. Tap water in San Francisco has a harsh overtone to it. Tap water in Western Oakland tastes a little muddy. Tap water in Vancouver and Leipzig is actually quite tasty. The best water I've ever had is hands down in the tiny town of Nagasasa in Japan. We actually dumped out all of our water bottles and brought 20 litres of the stuff back with us to Nagoya (where the tap water tastes terrible).

semi-extrinsic 4y ago
> It's only in the last two generations that other beverages have supplanted water. Prior to that it was a rare thing. It's only in the last six generations that water has supplanted beer (typically "small beer") as a beverage. Prior to that it was a dangerous thing to drink water unless you lived far out in the countryside.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  I doubt this very much. Beer costs money to make, and very few people would have been able to afford it. We also see much more recently that 3rd world countries didn't do this, either. People drank water.
  - semi-extrinsic 4y ago
    Why doubt it? People made beer at home from barley and water and mugworth, it was decidedly not expensive. Today the Czech Republic is the country with the highest beer consumption per capita, at 140 liters per person per year. Germany clocks in at 99, and the US is at 72. In the late middle ages, the average in Britain was 300 liters per person per year. In 1830, Americans over the age of 15 consumed more than 31 liters of pure alcohol per year. If that was all in 7% beer, it corresponds to 1.2 liters of strong beer every day. Probably quite a bit was also in whiskey, which was cheaper than milk back then.

NullPrefix 4y ago

How much cocaine a day would still be "in moderation" ? I mean, we are talking everything, and everything includes cocaine too.

UIUC_06 4y ago
A fascinating question. Are you worried?