[morkalork]

Companies need to stop using artificial sweeteners because they're just too sweet! If you ever do a low carb diet, it feels like your pallet is forever changed afterwards. Unmodified and unprocessed food taste naturally sweet on its own. Food with artificial sweeteners added tastes unbearably sweet.

[hedora]

Also, salt. I cooked lunch + dinner for myself for like a month, and now all processed food is just too damned salty.

There was an international agreement to cut salt in processed foods by a few percent a year for a few decades, and all stakeholders emphatically agreed to do it, since there's no real downside.

Of course, nothing happened after that.

The problem is that increasing salt a few percent gives processed food manufacturers a marginal advantage over their competitors since by desensitizes them to salt, and also tastes slightly better in side-by-side comparisons. This leads to a prisoner's dilemma type situation everyone is incentivized to work against their own long term best interests.

Regulation could trivially fix the problem by stopping the arms race, and doing it slowly wouldn't lead to people noticing the reduction.

[Semaphor]

I actually thought sweet stuff was sweet long before doing low-carb. I think a big difference is that here (Germany) we don’t put a ton of sugar and/or sweetener in pretty much everything. From what I’ve heard, that’s a thing in the US, and I know that it’s a thing in South Africa.

[martinsnow]

I can attest to that, coming from Denmark but living in Germany now. My wife is Thai and the food in southern Thailand can be sickly sweet, but if you travel to northern Thailand they usually leave out the sugar in foods.

Sugar and sweetners are insidious. Once you get used to sweet salads, you won't like normal salads anymore and then one start putting sweetners in every meal. It's surprising how unhealthy a salad can be.

[Semaphor]

> Once you get used to sweet salads

Ewww. I’m normally a regionalist, my state (SH) over the others. But sweet salad is a traditional thing here. I always make myself forget about that fact. It’s disgusting.

[DrThunder]

Yep, when I've cut sugar I've noticed things like carrots and even bell peppers actually taste sweet.

[SirMaster]

Carrots taste sweet to me and I eat lots of sugar and artificial sweeteners normally.