I thought I had finally found a healthy drink I liked with no artificial sweetness and they had to go and fuck it up

    • tal@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      6 days ago

      Stevia is not artificial you silly duck.

      Not to mention that while it’s OP’s money, at least in the US, natural and artificial sweeteners (or flavors) can be chemically-identical. I remember a bit…might have been from NPR Planet Money…on a substance that literally could be obtained either way, but some people thought that artificial flavors were bad, so there was a market for companies to go out and (more-expensively) extract the thing so that they could make the food they made say “natural flavor” rather than “artificial flavor”. The designation is just a function of whether you synthesize or extract the thing, the manufacturing process. It doesn’t say anything about the actual content.

      EDIT: Not the article I was thinking of, but same idea:

      https://health.wusf.usf.edu/npr-health/2017-11-03/is-natural-flavor-healthier-than-artificial-flavor

      All three experts say that ultimately, natural and artificial flavors are not that different. While chemists make natural flavors by extracting chemicals from natural ingredients, artificial flavors are made by creating the same chemicals synthetically.

      Platkin says the reason companies bother to use natural flavors rather than artificial flavors is simple: marketing.

      “Many of these products have health halos, and that’s what concerns me typically,” says Platkin. Consumers may believe products with natural flavors are healthier, though they’re nutritionally no different from those with artificial flavors.

      • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        6 days ago

        These are great reads. Thank you for the links!

        Also, thank you for paraphrasing one of them, because they helped pique my interest further.

        Appreciate you!

    • Thatoneguy@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      21
      ·
      6 days ago

      To clarify I don’t necessarily have an issue with stevia itself it’s the fact that it is usually mixed with erythritol which is bad for you.

      • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        24
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        6 days ago

        usually mixed with erythritol

        Your photo shows no evidence of this.

        is bad for you

        I’m fucking done reading shit on the internet where people say things and expect us to believe them at face value. You made this statement, and it isn’t my burden to provide evidence to prove you correct, you will.

        Please provide everyone here a link for us to read and change our minds.

        • Jax@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          6 days ago

          Not the guy, but https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9028423/ was an interesting read.

          A quick glance on google about Stevia might lead you to this link, but the preview shows “Results showed that stevia might lead to microbial imbalance, disrupting the communication between Gram-negative bacteria in the gut via either the LasR or RhlR …” which seems bad, until you read the rest of the good things that Stevia is supposedly doing.

          Plus, the text behind that ellipses is “However, even if stevia inhibits these pathways, it cannot kill off the bacteria.”

          So this might just be some good old misinformation on google’s part.

          Edit: I mean to say that google is intentionally misleading people about Stevia.

      • The2b@lemmy.vg
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        6 days ago

        Do you have any actual data showing that reasonable amounts of erythritol is worse for you than any alternatives?

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        6 days ago

        erythritol

        Shouldn’t that be on the label if it was in there too? How can you assume it is when it’s not labelled?

        IDK what shitty country this is from, but it’s for sure an illegal label here (EU), on at least 2 counts.