No more aspartame in Diet Pepsi

[MisterCreosote]

On the market in 1957. Off in 1961. Four years.

I bet there are considerably more items that were considered safe and actually ended up being safe.

You know thalidomide is still used today, right?

It was and is an effective drug against certain conditions, just like it had and has devastating side effects in certain populations (like pregnant women).

 

[doctorquant]

But I have drank 8-10 Diet Cokes a day for years.

Holy shirt! I'd be bouncing off the walls if I took in that much caffeine. I have two cups of Folgers coffee in the morning, and here lately, with my teaching schedule, I've been having a Coke or a half-and-half iced tea two or three times a week. I've had to deliberately cut those out because my heart's been racing.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Beer and bourbon, she doesn't blink. This shirt? Relentless. Same arguments as Ragu. Maybe she is Ragu.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Holy shirt! I'd be bouncing off the walls if I took in that much caffeine. I have two cups of Folgers coffee in the morning, and here lately, with my teaching schedule, I've been having a Coke or a half-and-half iced tea two or three times a week. I've had to deliberately cut those out because my heart's been racing.

Your two cups of coffee have more caffeine, I bet, than I take in in a day.

I'll cut back some day when my kids reliably permit me 6-7 hours of sleep.

 

[doctorquant]

I'd estimate my two cups of coffee have between 180 and 200 mg ... there's 45 mg per 12 oz. Diet Coke, so you jump ahead of me somewhere into your fifth one.

Then again I outweigh you by a ... few ... pounds. I'll admit it. I'm a caffeine lightweight.

 

[YankeeFan]

I guess I'd like to know when Ragu thinks the human diet was stable.

He seems to point to a date in the 60's or so when modified ingredients started to be used.

But, except for the rich, the human existence has been riddled with hunger and starvation, drought and war.

Meat and fresh fruits and vegetables? A balanced diet? Who had this until recently?

People, at best, ate locally and seasonally, and diets varied vastly across the globe. You were lucky if you had pickled, dried, salted, or otherwise preserved food to eat.

Only in modern history have the advancements in transportation, farming production, and refrigeration -- both in trucking and in the home -- allowed us to enjoy the abundance of food that is available to us year round, across the country/world.

But, even in my parents generation frozen food and canned food was much more prevalent. Without even considering something like aspartame, the diet I eat today is vastly different from what my parents grew up eating.

 

[cranberry]

Ragu is just more wary of unintended consequences than most people.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Here cran, eat this.

 

[amraeder]

The Blue Zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the White Zone.

No, the WHITE zone is for loading of passengers and there is no stopping in a BLUE zone.

 

[The Big Ragu]

I guess I'd like to know when Ragu thinks the human diet was stable.

He seems to point to a date in the 60's or so when modified ingredients started to be used.

But, except for the rich, the human existence has been riddled with hunger and starvation, drought and war.

Meat and fresh fruits and vegetables? A balanced diet? Who had this until recently?

People, at best, ate locally and seasonally, and diets varied vastly across the globe. You were lucky if you had pickled, dried, salted, or otherwise preserved food to eat.

Only in modern history have the advancements in transportation, farming production, and refrigeration -- both in trucking and in the home -- allowed us to enjoy the abundance of food that is available to us year round, across the country/world.

But, even in my parents generation frozen food and canned food was much more prevalent. Without even considering something like aspartame, the diet I eat today is vastly different from what my parents grew up eating.

The changes that led to supermarket freezers filled with processed foods began before the 60s. It was a major story of the last century.

The first mass scale processed food that really started us down the path was white bread -- made possible by the milling process that allowed them to remove the bran and germ from wheat. That is really a story of the 1920s and 1930s. The benefit was longer shelf life, which isn't surprising -- they removed the nutrients. Pests feast on those nutrients the same way we do.

If you go back generations before that, the food your grandmother was eating would have been largely recognizable to her grandmother, etc. None of them would recognize the things people largely eat today as food. I mean, bread might resemble something close to what they ate, but to them bread was flour, water, yeast, salt. Today bread is a food label with a bunch of unpronounceable things on it.

 

[YankeeFan]

The changes that led to supermarket freezers filled with processed foods began before the 60s. It was a major story of the last century.

The first mass scale processed food that really started us down the path was white bread -- made possible by the milling process that allowed them to remove the bran and germ from wheat. That is really a story of the 1920s and 1930s. The benefit was longer shelf life, which isn't surprising -- they removed the nutrients. Pests feast on those nutrients the same way we do.

If you go back generations before that, the food your grandmother was eating would have been largely recognizable to her grandmother, etc. None of them would recognize the things people largely eat today as food. I mean, bread might resemble something close to what they ate, but to them bread was flour, water, yeast, salt. Today bread is a food label with a bunch of unpronounceable things on it.

Right. It's been evolving for 100 years.

And, before that, there wasn't enough food to go around. It's the story of human civilization. So, it's never been stable.

We eat more processed food, but we also eat more fresh food.

 

[Key]

No, the WHITE zone is for loading of passengers and there is no stopping in a BLUE zone.

Listen Betty, don't start up with your white zone shirt again.