I thought I had finally found a healthy drink I liked with no artificial sweetness and they had to go and fuck it up
“Death to plastic”
“Here drink from this plastic-lined can” (https://www.plasticstoday.com/business/liquid-death-may-murder-your-thirst-but-it-won-t-kill-plastic-no-matter-what-the-ads-say)
Stevia can only be added in the manufacturing process by a cyclone valve which is actually quite noisy.
So, having a pre-chilled and conveniently-available product can be nice when you’re away from home, but if this is for at home, have you ever considered just, you know, making a pitcher of your own drink with whatever you want? Maybe take a Thermos of the stuff chilled or iced if you’re on the go? I mean, if you want agave as your sweetener, then you can make a drink with just agave and then tweak it to however you want. Food-grade citric acid is a preservative – I have a bottle in the pantry. You can purchase all sorts of flavors.
Like, if you buy a premade good, then you can benefit from the R&D done by the company, but if you have extremely exacting demands that you feel no company is making, you can rage about it or just make what you want. In general, drinks have an enormous markup – I mean, you’re mostly buying water with a little flavoring and coloring – so you can have exactly what you want and it’ll probably be cheaper, too.
I thought stevia wasn’t an artificial sweetener. It’s just a leaf.
Stevie leaf extract is a petroleum base sweetener. It was used as an artificial sweetener , but then they found that it could be naturally occurring in small quantities and rebranded. It works like natural flavors where it can still come from petroleum so long as its naturally occurring with some source. I find it extremely bitter and soapy, just like almost every other artificial sweetener.
Could you give a source? I can’t find ANY mention of stevia being “petroleum based”.
Afaik Stevia is entirely produced from the shrub.
That’s the trouble with words like ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’. They mean nothing. It would be better to call them refined additives, because I expect the “stevia” would be in a refined, extracted form when added - whether substantially changed from the form present in the plant or not, this could be considered artificial, if we insist on using this word.
This is what bothers me the most from marketing. Uranium, arsenic and petroleum are 100% natural too
How about drinking water from the tap? Much cheaper, not wasting cans, and healthy. If you live in a community with bad tap water, write a letter to your local water board, and buy a filtration tank you can put in your fridge.
If you must really have flavor, buy some of the powdered dehydrated lime or orange powder packets.
I presume you’re not from the US.
Many municipalities across the US have poor quality or non drinkable water, and many more do not offer public access to water fountains. Thus, bottled water is a huge market in the US as free facilities are not always available.
I’m Canadian and I legitimately cannot recall the last time I bought bottled or canned water. I bring my two 18.9L jugs to the store to fill them with filtered water for $5 and that’s the extent of my “bottled water” consumption. Elsewhere, I carry a metal water bottle I can get refilled anywhere for free.
Have drank tap water across the US for decades. Some municipalities are crappier than others, but a fridge filter tank takes care of those places.
Why do all the 0 calorie sweeteners have to taste like a dead hobo’s arse?
On the plus side, stevia isn’t artificial.
some people dont like the taste of stevia, i used at least the ones that have actual stevia, and not just filled with dextrose, which is basically sugar, or ethyrithiol. its pricier and less sweet. ALot of stevia products will have sugar in it. i buy the sweet leaf, i heard you can get pure stevia leaves, but its expensive.
What is “artificial?”
It is all marketing BS
Generally, artificial sweeteners are chemically synthesized while natural sweeteners are grown and refined.
I used to grow the stevia plant in my garden.
Does that matter at all?
In reality it is all arbitrary. By that definition table salt is artificial and poison nightshade is natural.
Salt is also a poison
but “table salt” contains iodine, and that requires a refining brine which is an industrial process. Its natural but also not. When it comes down to it, lots of this is splitting hairs
its like some vegans cant decide if a FIG is natural or not, since wild figs, or normal ones are fertilized by fig wasps and thier parasitoids. the fig wasps die in the fig after laying its eggs and fertilizing.
Stevia is DISGUSTING and by far the worst non-sugar sweetener. Aspartame is good in my opinion.
its sweet, but aspartame is generally not good for you long term.
Cite a source on that
It’s interesting to read people’s reactions to stevia. I don’t seem to have the same reactions/aftertaste others point out.
I much prefer stevia over other sweeteners. I wonder if there is some sort of cilantro type thing going on.
Edit: Turns out stevia can taste different to other people!
you have to be careful of which stevia brand you buy, most of them will contain real sugar, either maltodextrose or dextrose as the ingredient, or the sugar alcohol. i use sweetleaf brand, which is pure stevia. with the other brands with the dextrose you notice its sweeter too.
Imo stevia is one of the best of the no calorie sweeteners, but since that entire category is absolutely abhorrent that’s sort of like being called the fastest snail.
I think we have to allow that when you’re raised on sugar like we all were, substitutes are never going to live up.
However lots of people throughout history didn’t have refined sugar. The ancient Egyptians for example. What would they have thought of stevia?
I once went on a strict no-carb diet for a few months and a stevia tea at the end of the day was a very enjoyable treat that I looked forward to. Now, having gone back to a normal diet, it doesn’t taste as good.
So I think habituation is a big part of it.
the sweetleaf brand doesnt have the wierd dextrose ingredients that the others have, i used 2 different ones and they all had sugar in it.
That’s precisely why I use it in my coffee and have for many years. However there’s a big difference from one brand to another I’ve found. Sweet Leaf stevia drops are the only kind I’ll use now.
i use it too, because almost all the other brands have dextrose, which is basically actual sugar, or ehtyrithiol, which is a sweetener, but it can cause GI issues. I bought 2 boxes from amazon to try it out, its worht it. its pricey but not sugar is better.
Yeah the first stevia I ever got had dextrose in it and literally 8 grains was enough, it was silly. I didn’t know until I was almost done that it was just basically sugar.
Stevia isn’t artificial lol
But it tastes artificial and fucks with lots of tummies.
Yeah Stevia tastes like poison to me, super bitter.
Basically all artificial sweeteners taste like either bitter or nothing at all to me. So I’m really angry when I buy a product I’ve been buying for years and it suddenly tastes like a Nintendo Switch cartridge.
>:(
I think anything you’re not used to has the potential to fuck with your tummy
How were you convinced sweet tea was a healthy drink to begin with? https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-stevia Stevia to reduce the amount of agave nectar used is making it healthier if anything. Can you actually taste it if it’s used sparingly in addition to real sugar?
Stevia leaves a disgusting after taste and is an immediate deal breaker for me in any drink.
Stevia is not artificial you silly duck. And it’s more sustainable to grow than the fucking sugar you hypocritically enjoy every day. Get over it.
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.
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.
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.
This label part about plastics is what’s called green-washing here, and is illegal unless what they are doing is a very signifikant part of the price of the product.
The labeling of what’s NOT in the drink is also under similar regulation, but I don’t recall what it’s called. But the fact that a “sugar” drink doesn’t contain fat is irrelevant and misleading.Whatever country this is from has bullshit regulation.
The thing that is ABSOLUTELY NOT a problem is the Stevia which is clearly labeled!So the “mildly infuriating” part is completely misguided compared to the real problems of that product.
Edit:
Just noticed, Carbs 3%, sugar 6% incl. added sugar 12%.
That’s impossible! You can’t have less carbs than sugar, since sugar is a carb. So these labels are probably illegal in EU on no less than 3 counts!!It’s a US label and the percents are % of recommended daily intake. So that’s 3% of your daily recommended carbohydrate intake, 6% of your daily recommended intake of sugar, and 12% of your daily recommended intake of “added” sugar. The recommendation is something like, no more than half of your carbs should come from sugar, and no more than half of those should be added during manufacturing (i.e. most of your sugar intake should be from fresh fruit, etc.). So the numbers do line up.
