Neat Post on Stumptuous.com

[Hunter Gatherer]

This is back from December so forgive me if someone already posted this.

Artificial sweeteners not a “get out of bad habits free†card

But then, we knew that already, right?

[ShannahR]

Wow. That part of that that really got me was:

“[T]he absolute preference for taste sweetness may lead to a re-ordering in the hierarchy of potentially addictive stimuli, with sweetened diets. . . taking precedence over cocaine and possibly other drugs of abuse.â€

Digest that for a moment. Sweetness beats out coke.


Yikes

[reinhard]

Thanks for the great link, HG. Nice to see some evidence for my intuition!

Digest that for a moment. Sweetness beats out coke

I guess that's why coke was able to get rid of the coke

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola did once contain an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass, but in 1903 it was removed.

Reinhard

[Hunter Gatherer]

I liked her comment

If we constantly hammer our taste buds with simplistic, blunt-instrument flavours, we don’t develop the ability to appreciate the subtler flavours that occur in the natural world.

The sad irony, of course, is that the natural-world flavours are infinitely more interesting. Developing sensitivity to real-world flavours actually makes you a more careful, nuanced eater who focuses on food quality, and ultimately enjoys food more. After all, be honest: have you really savoured the bouquet of cheezies? If you really focused on the scent and taste notes of Rock Star drink, or Twizzlers, you wouldn’t touch the $#!^ because you’d start to notice the waxy mouth feel or the chemical aftertaste. But if I handed you a $10 Godiva truffle, you’d certainly spend a little quality time with that bad boy before snarfing it down.

And I thought that it was funny that the authors of the paper referred to "limited tolerance for complex tastes" as your tastes being in an "infantile state." Probably a good description, but not very flattering.

I also thought it was cool that our taste-buds are so much more effective at picking out bitter than sweet.