What I never understand about the soda thing is why people don't just switch to the zero calorie versions of them. I drink tons of the stuff myself (Sprite Zero being among my favorites), and while I suppose the science is still a bit out on whether non-nutritive sweeteners are a good replacement, they just have to be better than all that sugar.
I don't have links or anything handy, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but I _have_ seen things that confirm my anecdata that sugar free drinks are pretty horrible for your gut microbiome. I do still prefer them to their calorie-dense versions when I have one, but I think it's worth being very cautious about drinking tons of the stuff and assuming it's at all "better".
I prefer beer, if I want a carbinated drink. And a full bodied beer, not a light beer. Sure, they have carbs and calories, but they also have nutritional value unlike light beer or a soda.
There are monks that made a stout they could drink for all of lent. Nothing but stout for 40 days. Each serving was enough nutrition-dense to act as a meal replacement without causing alcohol intoxication.
Perhaps they’re better than sugar, but so far isn’t the science showing them to be also detrimental?
After quitting soda and sweetened beverages for a while, my tastes adjusted and now soda of any sort is insipidly sweet and syrupy. Basically the entire history of humanity was spent drinking unsweetened beverages, all of a sudden our species can’t abide to drink plain water?
I don’t drink a ton of soda but I can’t stand the artificially flavored stuff. One kind - aspartame maybe? - gives me a headache. The others just don’t taste very good.
Coke had one out for a while that was half sugar half Stevia. That wasn’t so bad for me. It still had a bit of the aftertaste but it seemed like a good compromise. They discontinued it.
For me the secret is ice coldness. It matters way more for artificial soft drinks than for the sugar based versions, in my opinion. I definitely know what you mean by the aftertaste, and it's minimized by having more ice in the cup than drink.
Not that you should be attempting to drink more of the stuff... but I figure it's a form of harm reduction. Sugar is certainly worse for your health if you have this vice.
For me it's the opposite. I find Diet Coke delicious, but classic coke i find unbearably sweet and syrupy, and it makes me feel awful and gross afterward.
