peters@cubsvax.UUCP (11/25/83)
Michael Bishop asked why the Coke folks put both NutraSweet and saccharin in their diet-Coke. The answer is simple. NutraSweet tastes much more like sugar than saccharin, lacking the bitter after-taste, but is many times more expensive on an equal- sweetness basis. (By that I mean that to get the same amount of sweetness you need ten or twenty times more NutraSweet than saccharin, not necessarily by weight, but by dollar-value.) So what Coke is trying to do is to decrease the amount of saccharin only to the point where most people won't be able to detect the bitter after-taste, which, below a certain level, gets lost in the other flavors. This, they feel, will enable them to produce a superior product than the all-saccharin formulation at a lower cost than the all-aspartame (=NutraSweet) formulation. Two additional comments: aspartame is pretty amazing. The sugar substitute called "Equal" gets most of its sweetness from it, and tastes almost just like sucrose -- a little sweeter, in some sense. It's also quite a curiosity chemically, since it's a polypeptide, not a carbohydrate. One of the few sweet polypeptides, I believe. Peter S. Shenkin (cubsvax!peters)
ward@hao.UUCP (Mike Ward) (11/29/83)
What the *real* reason for this is: The good folks at Coca are doing is looking after our well-being... They are making sure we die of cancer from the sacharrine before the Nutra-Sweet gives us brain damage. -- Michael Ward seismo!hao!sa%ward decvax!brl-bmol!hao!sa%ward ucbvax!hplabs!hao!sa%ward allegra!nbires!hao!sa%ward
crl@pur-phy.UUCP (Charles LaBrec) (11/29/83)
Believe it or not, I know someone who drinks Tab FOR the saccharin aftertaste, and would stop drinking it if they removed it!!! Charles LaBrec UUCP: pur-ee!Physics:crl, purdue!Physics:crl INTERNET: crl @ pur-phy.UUCP