this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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"The IARC will reportedly classify aspartame as a possible carcinogen. But this isn’t a food safety agency, and the context matters."

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[–] baggyspandex@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah buuuuuuuuut bottom line et al

[–] CamelCityCalamity@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

If you don't mind me being pedantic, "et al." is short for "et alia" which means "and other people". "Etc", short for "et cetera", means "and other things". You only use "et al." when talking about people not named in a list.

The More You Know 🌠

[–] darthfabulous42069@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which I don't understand. It literally would be cheaper for them to use stevia or monk fruit and call it a day than to quibble over something so trivial.

[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

On the scale of Pepsi or Coke, a seemingly trivial amount like 1/2 a cent a can adds up to significant money. It's amazing how companies pinch pennies when dealing in volume like that. They sold 32 billion cases of beverages in 2022. No idea what the real figure is, but let's say 5,000,000,000 of those are diet drinks with aspartame... that's 120 billion cans, so if the other sweetener cost only 1 cent more per can that's 1.2 billion dollars.

Since the verdict on aspartame isn't clear, they'd also have to tweak the formula for flavor, and switching would be somewhat of a PR admission that there's something wrong with aspartame, I imagine they're very reluctant to change anything.

[–] MrFlamey@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Bottom line won't change when users of your product are addicted. Since coke etc. are full of sweetener, which I assume causes a similar level of addiction to regular sugar, those that drink it won't mind if the price goes up 5 cents or whatever because cola put some slightly better sweetener in it. Cola would probably just make a new branded version or slap a "new an improved flavour" on the can and jack up the price by 10 cents anyway. Actually, people are pretty particular about the flavour, so that's probably why they won't do it. They must have gradually shitted up the recipe to get to the current version so people didn't burn down coke HQ.