3. Can cause gastrointestinal pain 4. Promotes overeating

5. Aftertaste reminiscent of something that would warrant a call to poison control

I have that reaction to all USian soda (am UKian) because of HFCS rather than straight up sugar. Honestly, to me, the diet stuff actually tastes slightly less awful.

Weirdly, diet Tropical Tango tastes better to me than the sugared version, possibly because its flavourings are so artificial already that the artificial sweetener fits better ... or possibly just because I'm weird.

Real-sugar soda variants in the US (we do have them! And not just imported Mexican coke!) usually come in glass which makes it harder to do a useful side-by-side tasting. I do prefer them, but I'm not sure how much of that's the glass. Meanwhile, I can tell instantly when I've accidentally tasted something with artificial sweetener in it. I've even picked it out from products that have real sugar but are supplemented with a bit of something artificial, waaaaay down the ingredient list, having no idea in advance that it'd be there.

[EDIT] I should add that I'd be surprised if the sugared variants typically have no difference to the HFCS sort other than subbing out the sweetener, so that's another wrinkle to attempting straight comparisons of sugar vs. HFCS

Any food can cause gastrointestinal pain. If you eat a lot of it :) Also any food that tastes good can be reasonable claimed to "promote overeating".

Doesn't regular soda fall into these categories, too?

There are numerous studies that link artificial sugar to overeating even when you account for the self-selection bias. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, so you should evaluate their quality for yourself but the story goes something like this.

Your body uses some pretty basic heuristics in order to determine one, that you're full, and two that you're getting a sufficient caloric intake. Introducing high-volume, low-calorie foods into your diet isn't necessarily a problem, but your body will quickly determine that you need more volume to reach its caloric needs. Especially if you use diet soda / lite snacks to satisfy hunger. So when you mix 'diet' foodstuffs with normal food you will more than likely overeat on the high calorie foods leading to more weight gain.

This is where philosophy for the other dieting extreme comes from. If you normally eat extremely high-calorie/low-volume foods to satisfy hunger and put up with a grumbly stomach for a while you will adjust the other direction and under-eat on normal calorie foods, ideally leading to weight loss.

> There are numerous studies that link artificial sugar to overeating even when you account for the self-selection bias. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, so you should evaluate their quality for yourself but the story goes something like this.

Sources? This is something I spent a bit of time looking into and the consensus at the time was there was no strong consensus.

Coke zero is actually quite nice.

I'm not a big fan of the metallic aspartame aftertaste.

The vast majority of people can't tell the difference in double blind taste tests, especially at the cold temperatures it's served at.

I reckon with properly blinded tests many people couldn't tell the difference between 7up and coke if you served it cold enough.

After drinking a lot of diet Coke & Dew because soda is free in my office and I don't want to be a fat ass, I actually prefer it to the regular stuff. The regular is too sticky and sickly.

That's what i also realized. it's still bad, but maybe a bit better than the sugary one.