[logicallee]

this is almost certainly wrong. (That nothing can be blamed.) I can't eat much sugar for medical reasons, so that means that entire aisles are basically unavailable to me. things like cereals, cookies, cakes, lots of delicious stuff. But there is something or someone (or some process or some state of affairs) to blame here.

Because check it out: stevia is delicious, and with splenda and all sorts of other zero-calorie artificial sweetener choices (going back to saccharine) it would be trivial to make almost all of those food choices in varieties that are artificially sweetened. what do you want to bet that the high fructose corn syrup or sugar industry has a say in directing the conversation that leads to these foods simply not existing? They literally don't exist in supermarkets: you make them at home.

why the fuck would an expensive premium food like this - https://www.specialk.com/en_US/products/protein-cereal.html have 20% by weight in sugar! Generally speaking what I've just linked is a great food, and it's premium and expensive and for those who are very health-conscious. It hardly has any calories, converting by multiplying the suggested serving by 3, it has only 360 calories in 100 grams, which contains 30g of protein (so that if you further multiply by three to get to your daily intake, you get to 90g of protein, enough for just about anyone, reaching only 1080 calories - so it seems great to me. you could literally consider this diet food.)

But it has 21 grams of sugar in those 100 grams. (I happened to find someone weighing 100 grams of cereal, though a denser one - here is what that looks like: http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/cerealpannacotta1.jp... -- * EDIT: also found someone who happened to weigh 20 grams of sugar, this is what that looks like: http://alcademics.typepad.com/.a/6a00e553b3da20883401a3fb659... (that's about 5 cubes of sugar.)).

Why does it have 21% by weight sugar! Why not use an artificial sweetener? Like, it's not even an option.

You can't really find stevia alternatives. The third ingredient in what I just linked was Sugar. Here is someone asking them to include stevia: https://community.kelloggs.com/kelloggs/topics/special-k-pro...

Like, what gives?

I realize that stevia might be expensive compared with sugar, but some people would likely pay for that. You can't get foods made that way though, unless you make it yourself.

why is that? There is someone to blame here. It's a dichotomy: you eat the 21 grams of sugar, or you don't eat the 100 grams of Special K Protein. It's not about overconsumption: it's about a lack of choice. Why doesn't the artificial-sweetener version exist, at all? There is something, or someone (or an abstract economic process, or something) to blame here. While "blaming" an economic process (or a lack of FDA mandate, or ... whatever) might sound bitter due to the phrasing, we can still ask what leads to this state of affairs. I don't usually like to play the "blame game" or put things in those terms, but in this case, I'm missing out on a lot of foods, so yes, I'll do it. If Coca Cola can do it, and get it everywhere, why can't dessert "foods" like oreos or breakfast cereal, do it? They simply don't exist in artificially sweetened versions. Why not?

[maxxxxx]

I also get headaches, fever and joint pain from taking in any sugar. It would be so nice to find cereals where I can add sweetener as needed. In theory they should be cheaper since they don't have to add sugar but in reality they don't even exist.

[DenisM]

Steel-cut oats. Add water and salt, microwave on medium for 12 minutes. Doesn't get any easier, or cheaper.

[maxxxxx]

I know. It just gets old over time. I wouldn't mind sugar free cornflakes for example. Or Ovaltine with Stevia.

[DenisM]

I hear you. I try slicing fruits or berries into it, as well as butter or sour cream. But that gets old as well.

Getting decent carbs that are not boring has proved surprisingly difficult for me.

[maxxxxx]

To make it even worse I also can't handle fruits and berries. They also give me headaches because of their sugar. Getting decent carbs is really hard.

[DenisM]

Sorry, man.

BTW, the link in your profile is broken.

[saint_fiasco]

When cooking, sometimes the taste of the ingredients isn't everything. Have you ever forgotten to put salt to something you were cooking, and then tried to add salt after cooking to correct it? It doesn't taste the same because in addition to just tasting salty, the salt was supposed to participate in some chemical reaction while it was being cooked.

Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, but they lack its other chemical properties. Just because stevia works just as well as sugar when you put it in your tea, doesn't mean it will work well as part of a complex recipe or processed food.

[logicallee]

certainly. I imagine the Coca Cola company put a ton of research into formulating Coke Zero and getting it accepted as well.

I'm not saying it's a simple substitution. But it's certainly possible, since there are home recipe versions. Nobody asked for parity - it doesn't have to taste the same.

But I'm already talking about a food - Protein Special K - that I expect to already taste like crap compared with some pure sweetness like Honey Nut Cheerios or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We're talkking about why even a food that does not have to meet as high a standard, that is literally a diet food for fitness-conscious people, still includes 20% sugar by weight?

So while I get what you're saying, it's still a perplexing state of affairs. It's not as though SOME of the cereals came in stevia versions, and some didn't. None of them do. Doesn't exist.

It's possible, it's easy - you can make it at home. It's not available.

And we have an example from the Coca Cola company and its diet coke / coke zero, which are great products, of getting the marketing and other parts right. You can get it everywhere, even McDonald's.

I'm not asking why there isn't a "diet big mac" that has 0 calories -- clearly an impossible goal.

I'm asking why entire aisles, such as the cookie aisles, breakfast cereal aisles, cake aisles, have no product choices, despite this being possible, with artificial sweeteners or stevia (at any price or in limited availability).

It just doesn't make sense. There is something/someone/some state of affairs, to blame here, and the fact that it's not a simple substitution isn't it. I don't need every product to come in a stevia version. But none of them do. This is perplexing, weird, and tells me that there is something/someone/etc to blame. Because you can look up recipes and see that it's easy. When I put artificial sweetener on my oats, I'm literally doing it at home. But no oat mix comes with that. I have to mix it myself. And this is true along many product categories.

Why? There is something fishy here. There is something/someone/some economic process/some state of affairs to blame.

[logfromblammo]

As an experiment, I would try saturating the cereal with water and fermenting with Saccharomyces and Acetobacter to get the sugars out.

I have a hunch that it would taste absolutely horrible, though. I'm not sure there would be enough stevia in the world to bring it back to palatable.

Personally, I would probably prefer to just eat some chicken eggs if I wanted protein for breakfast. That's 160 kcal/100g, with 1g sugar and 13g of protein--as 100% complete protein. And eggs are about $5/kg or less in the US.

I'm not even certain why anybody health-conscious would ever bother with boxed cereals at all, for exactly the reason parent points out--sugar. If I wanted complex carbs in my breakfast, I'd boil a potato, cool it overnight, and heat it back up with the eggs in the morning. No flakes or nuggets are necessary. No sweeteners are necessary. If desired, ketchup is plenty sweet enough for that potato.

But crap.... why can't they make ketchup with stevia, or just unsweetened ketchup? It's back to the same problem. If you can't eat sugar, the American grocery store is mostly a colorful wasteland of foods you just can't touch.

Munchies, munchies, everywhere, and all the cupboards creak; Munchies, munchies, everywhere, nor any speck to eat.

[okreallywtf]

To be honest, I don't like the taste of stevia. It tastes a lot like other sugar substitutes (like aspartame) to me. That being said, I've had it used in cooking (without knowing it) and thought it tasted OK. Maybe in commercial foods they make it taste more like existing sugar substitutes because thats what is expected by people who already seek out sugar free foods?

[logicallee]

You say "who already seek out sugar free foods" but even these people (such as me) are not being sold a product in any of the categories I've mentioned. Stevia and other artificial sweeteners have lots of sales (and you can find boxes of the stuff in literally any grocery store) but there is some process that prevents any of these making it into any product in the mentioned categories, period. Even if people do it themselves. It doesn't make sense to me. What prevents anyone from selling in an assembled form, what people use these things to make? Sales of sweeteners are not low. Lots of people are buying them. Obviously they're buying them to make sweet stuff. so it's not like we're talkiing about "why isn't stevia available in grocery stores." We are talking about "why isn't anyone putting it into cereals, cakes, cookies, in any one of a bunch of categories. why is it entirely missing from whole aisles of the grocery store." I am saying there's something to blame for this. It's not the fact that they don't taste as good (which I'll grant.) I mean, you have people buying plain things and buying stevia to put on it, but you don't have anyone selling the things with stevia in it. Why not?

There's something fishy here. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy by the sugar and high fructose corn syrup industry, but that would certainly have high explanatory power and is the MO mentioned in the article we're reading about....

[fastoptimizer]

I'm a diabetic and I eat 70% of calories in carbs. I make sure they are all low GI.

My statement was mostly about average people, not sick people. I'm fairly sure diseased individuals are an exception and have to make sure to put their disease in remission (or to meet their genetic predispositions) with proper diet plans.

[brandon272]

Coca Cola has a stevia version that seems to be very niche. I rarely see it, nor have I tried it. But I wonder why it hasn't been pushed more, especially in a market where your product is increasingly demonized because of the 30 - 40g of sugar each serving contains.

[brianwawok]

Don't move from sugar to fake sugar. Move from sugar to other flavors.

Using fake sugar is like a diet, and diets don't last. Lifestyle changes do. Like making every thing you eat not need to be sweet.

[ashark]

I think it helps to visualize a soda container as filled with M&Ms or some other candy. You'd feel like a disgusting lard-ass if you had a big cup full of M&Ms with your meal and kept getting refills on it, right? In fact it'd probably seem like such an obviously-bad idea that, even if you really liked cups full of M&Ms, you'd only have them occasionally, as a treat, and you'd still feel kinda guilty about it.

Look at soda that way, and it gets way easier to turn it down. It's basically candy. When you have three glasses of it with a meal (remember when US restaurants didn't do free refills? That was probably a good thing) that's gross and obviously terrible. When you even have a little with most meals it's still gross. A rare treat? Fine, go ahead.

[logicallee]

not true. you can drink diet coke or coke zero for decades and nothing bad will happen.

why do you want to tell me not to eat dessert foods like american cereals for breakfast, or oreos, in some artificially-flavored version. you're simply wrong that this would make my change in lifestyle "not last." I'm not even overweight.

[brianwawok]

Ultimately I only care insofar as I will be in the hook for your medical bills in 20 years. It's your body.

[logicallee]

my Coke example was actually the fact that Diet Coke has existed for decades, and it and Coke Zero are available everywhere. They taste fine. I don't care about a stevia version. I drink lots of diet coke or coke zero (don't have a very strong preference) and want to eat lots of artificially flavored oreos the same way. I can certainly do that: if I take twelve hours to read and track down ingredients and make them myself or something. these products are not made by nabisco, and oreo is just one example. it's the best-selling cookie in america and comes in all these ridiculous flavors:

http://torispilling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/OREO-FLAV...

including literally "swedish goldfish" which is disgusting on its face, and also actually disgusting as reported here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/4x4lgz/swedish...

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4xzdml/my_dad_eats_...

So it's just disgusting.

But if you google Stevia oreos (which wouldn't be disgusting) you get...home recipes to make them.

why? Why, in all of these flavors, including abominations such as swedish goldfish, does stevia not exist?

It doesn't add up. 100%, there's something, someone, some process, some state of affairs to blame here.. . .

[ChoGGi]

Thanks, now I want Oreo to come out with a salmiakki version

Edit: Never mind I see Alex already reviewed a knockoff brand http://www.salmiyuck.com/2010/02/black-domino-salmiakki-chil...