I've attempted to drink normal sugar-filled soft drinks and felt terrible after a few days. That's based on 3 cans a day. The amount of sugar is just too much for me to handle.

I can drink water, but it is quite boring. I actually find drinking just water stops quenching my thirst and my mouth dries out progressively. Drinking fruit juice is also not going to work as it is very acidic, and I just can't handle more than a couple of glasses.

A mix of these drinks is fine, but not ideal. I just want a constant I can drink without preparatiog.

Diet soda fits all the criteria for me. It has a taste, unlike water, contains caffeine (diet coke is my poison), and rehydrates. I can also drink it all day without any real side-effects. The downside being the aspartame and phenylalnine it contains which may or may not be an issue depending on what you read.

I do limit myself to 3 cans per day, but then aspartame is contained in other things I consume every day. The most frequent of which is sugar free gum.

If there are any alternatives to aspartame-using diet drinks, sugar filled drinks, or just plain water I should be trying I'd appreciate some suggestions.

There is really nothing wrong with water or tea. Try especially a nice green tea or some other good chinese flavors.

If you must how about use stevia in low amounts for sweetening. It is also not without issues but time has shown that is ok when not consumed overly.

But, why?

Except for a few periods of a few months, when I chose to go off caffeine or limited my intake for other reasons, I've been drinking several liters a day of aspartame-and-caffeine-containing drinks since 1996. I've yet to identify any related effects: my teeth aren't great, but haven't been eaten away by acid; I'm overweight, but less than I have been at times since 1990; I don't find dehydration to be a problem. Some of my friends drink similarly large quantities, and none of them have shown any apparent effects, either. This, of course, is mere anecdote, but surely if there were really a serious problem then there'd be an epidemic of some problem easily traced to aspartame, given that millions of people drink liters per day of diet colas and other drinks?

As I am falling into that category (so far drinking diet soda regularly from 16-32 with no noticeable side effects) I do wonder what, if any, problems may come about in later life due to aspartame intake.

I sigh a bit with relief when I read these articles debunking the claims of how bad this stuff is for you. But the doubt still nags at me that there is something not right about taking in so much of this stuff. But then I have the same doubts about too much sugar intake.

The main reasons to avoid sugar from reading I've done in the past are to do with insulin spiking which is indeed a very bad issue, though eating polished rice (white rice), bread etc are all just as bad for that (bread is worse as it also contains sugars). Negative effects on teeth being attributed to sugars are largely false and are more to do with the acidity of the carbonated water used.

I've done a bit of research on various sweeteners and have been trying to find the "perfect drink" but so far, no luck. I want something fizzy and sweet with caffeine but not sweetened using HFCS, sucralose, aspartame, etc.

I use powdered stevia on my cereal and in my tea. There is a soda out there sweetened with stevia but the cost is prohibitive. I have mostly replaced coffee with hot tea and will drink iced tea once in a while but the hassle is usually not worth it to me. Same with the carbonated water mixed with syrup route. Sparkling water does not taste good on its own.

For now, I guess I'll stick with Diet Sunkist until something better comes along.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/health-benefits-cinnamon/

But what about the excitotoxic effects? I've heard aspartame excites nerve cells in the brain in unusually increased levels which eventually causes the cells to burst and die. How about the truth on that?

By far most people are worried about the formaldehyde and mood/headache effects, so that's what I ended up reducing the article to.

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tooth.asp

Actually simply making a large pot of tea and then cool it and put it into the fridge for some time results in a very nice drink.

The biggest reason is it is unnatural material that your body is not used to. These people who study the effects are mere scientists. They have no way to know how your genetically evolved body processes things at a detailed level, they can only look at it at one tiny narrow perspective. To be safe its generally best to avoid unnatural food and drinks completely.

Irrelevant, our bodies are capable of handling quite a lot.

These people who study the effects are mere scientists.

And the only people qualified to study these effects are then... what? High priests? Quacks? Astrologers?

They have no way to know how your genetically evolved body processes things at a detailed level, they can only look at it at one tiny narrow perspective.

Uh, science has mapped the biochemical pathways of a lot of substances, and science learns more each day.

To be safe its generally best to avoid unnatural food and drinks completely.

How about perfectly natural toxins, then? Should we avoid those? Or are they safe because they are "natural"?

To argue that something is natural or unnatural is a sure sign that you don't really know what you're talking about.

You can simply answer this, is it in human's natural diet to have lots of aspartame intake each day?

Furthermore, you are overestimating the power of science. If you think humans have the power of understanding human body so well in a mere 200 - 300 years of scientific past, in comparison to the millions of years of evolution complexity, and the complexity of living organism, you are disillusioned by a great magnitude - that would be a godly power if it was true. I am all with science, and great scientists know to value their experiments humbly.

All I am saying is avoid irregular diets for full safety since humans can't know for sure with narrow angled experiments.

Most of the food we eat every day today has not been part of the normal diet of humans throughout our evolution.The vegetables, the fruits, and the animals we eat have been bred and refined and genetically modified, and most are less than a few hundred years old.

You can simply answer this, is it in human's natural diet to have lots of aspartame intake each day?

No, but so what? If scientific consensus says that aspartame is perfectly safe to eat, I'll trust that. I avoid aspartame because I think it tastes like crap. That's a perfectly valid reason not to eat it.

"Because it's not natural and I don't trust those so-called scientists that say it's safe" is right up there with astrology and homeopathy.

It really bothers me when people trust more in word-of-mouth than they do in science.

I have yet to see a fixed time limit test (IE when the first mouse dies, kill them all and do the autopsies rather than wait for them to drop one by one). If Aspartame causes cancer it should be significantly visible in the subject animals. However they're living longer and dying of naturally occurring cancers, IIRC one study gave a 20% increase in longevity in the test group that was being fed ridiculous quantities of aspartame (equivalent to pounds a day for humans) but this was never mentioned or pointed out as being a relevant variable.

Me too. Still I have some sympathy for them, because science is not on-off type of thing. You can't just research if particular substance is safe or dangerous. You must know what you are searching for. You must figure out a level for "safe exposure". Thus it can take long time (even decades) before substance x is found and agreed to be harmful. Considering the history of human evolution and huge changes in our diet and chemical environment in the last 50 years, it's perfectly acceptable to be skeptical, until proven otherwise. Bisphenol A makes good example.

> A common error, when judging the effects of radioactivity or the toxicity of some substance, is to assume a linear response model without threshold (that is, without a dose rate below which there is no ill eect). Presumably there is no threshold effect for cumulative poisons like heavy metal ions (mercury, lead), which are eliminated only very slowly if at all.

> But for virtually every organic substance (such as saccharin or cyclamates), the existence of a finite metabolic rate means that there must exist a finite threshold dose rate, below which the substance is decomposed, eliminated, or chemically altered so rapidly that it has no ill effects. If this were not true, the human race could never have survived to the present time, in view of all the things we have been eating.

> Indeed, every mouthful of food you and I have ever taken contained many billions of kinds of complex molecules whose structure and physiological effects have never been determined, and many millions of which would be toxic or fatal in large doses. We cannot doubt that we are daily ingesting thousands of substances that are far more dangerous than saccharin, but in amounts that are safe, because they are far below the various thresholds of toxicity. But at present there is hardly any substance except some common drugs, for which we actually know the threshold.

I'm interested in the current state of stevia as it is a real (maybe hyped) alternative sweetener.

I'd be interested in knowing which of the studies reviewed in the meta study were funded by corporations incentivized by aspartame.