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by 41b696ef1113 1377 days ago
What is a y equivalent gram of sweetener?

A cursory look says a 12oz Coke Cola has 39grams of sugar while a Diet Coke has 0.2 grams of aspartame. How would you like it to be labelled?

2 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame: “Aspartame is an artificial non-saccharide sweetener 200 times sweeter than sucrose”

⇒ I expect they would like to see something like “39 REAL”, respectively “40 ARTIFICIAL” on the label.

Of course there’s a can of worms in that there are multiple ‘real’ sugars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar) and producers will try to talk down that 200, but I think that’s solvable.

What’s less solvable is that producers will talk down the unit size used to compute the amount of sugar, just as they do with the unit size used to compute the number of calories.

Alternatively, this could be shown as a sweetness rating with “x% artificial” added, or just as a sweetness rating alongside the existing ‘calories’ rating.

> Of course there’s a can of worms in that there are multiple ‘real’ sugars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar) and producers will try to talk down that 200, but I think that’s solvable.

Total grams of sugar per 100 and total sweeteners equivalent to y grams of sucrose per 100 when both are dissolved in water would suffice.

That allows comparing relative sweetness of drinks, but runs the risk of consumers, seeing “1g per 100ml”, will say “there’s only 1g of sugar in this drink” and then gulp down a bottle of the stuff.

If the typical consumer drinks the stuff in bottle sizes, maybe the dietary information on the bottle should use ‘per bottle’.

That's the kind of idiotic logic that leads to a 600ml bottle or a 60g bag of chips being '2 servings'.

The relevant question is 'how sugary is this substance'. With a secindary question of 'how sweet is it' to set expectations for people who want somet=ing sweet or peoplewho don't. Give people the basic level of respect to decide how much they have after that.

Unit size should be per 100g

Talking down the 200 for asparteme is fine as long as the ratio is always the same for asparteme

Put a 11g/100g or whatever it works out to on both of them (or some closeish but standardized ratio for the asparteme if it doesn't work out exact).