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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 recal
by 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 agoHow does watermelon taste for you?
- eropple 4y agoThis 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 agoNot 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 agoThis 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 agoHonestly, 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.