Coca Cola is guilty of misleading advertising

Coca Cola has the temerity to advertise their Coca Cola product as "Original taste" when it has been adulterated by the addition of 'non-nutritive sweetners".

From Wikipedia and other sources:

Each taste bud contains 50 to 100 taste receptor cells. Taste receptors in the mouth sense the five taste modalities: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness (also known as savory or umami). Scientific experiments have demonstrated that these five tastes exist and are distinct from one another.

Sodium saccharin is an artificial sweetener with effectively no food energy. It is about 300–400 times as sweet as sucrose but has a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations.

Aspartame is a widely used artificial sweetener that has been linked to pediatric and adolescent migraines. Upon ingestion, aspartame is broken, converted, and oxidized into formaldehyde in various tissues.

A 2019 study reported a possible link between nonnutritive sweeteners, including stevia, and disruption in beneficial intestinal flora. The same study also suggested nonnutritive sweeteners may induce glucose intolerance and metabolic disorders.

As with most nonnutritive sweeteners, a major downside is the taste. Stevia has a mild, licorice-like taste that’s slightly bitter. Some people enjoy it, but it’s a turn-off for others.

What happens to your body when you eat artificial sweeteners

Whether non-nutritive sweeteners are safe depends on your definition of safe. Studies leading to FDA approval have ruled out cancer risk, for the most part. However, those studies were done using far smaller amounts of diet soda than the 24 ounces a day consumed by many people who drink diet soda. We really don’t know what effect large amounts of these chemicals will have over many years.

And there are other health concerns beside cancer. In the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, daily consumption of diet drinks was associated with a 36% greater risk for metabolic syndrome and a 67% increased risk for type 2 diabetes. Aren’t these diseases that artificial sweeteners may help prevent in the first place?

Since sweetness is a component of taste and non-nutritive sweeteners have a pecu**** aftertaste, I don’t see how the taste can be original!! Absolutely not. I have suffered many iterations and adulterations of the Coca Cola taste over the past 60 years or more.

Therefore Coca Cola is guilty of misleading advertising.

I have an allergic reaction to saccharine and other ‘sweetener’ derivatives, so I am painfully aware of the presence of these in any product. I get severe headaches, my throat produces excessive mucous and I develop hay fever symptoms.

I and my family have been Coca Cola ‘addicts’ for many years, myself for more than 55 years. We typically used to go through a case of 1.5l per week. We used to buy the 2l bottles but found that the 1.5l returnable preserved the carbonation best. I estimate that I alone must have consumed more than 128,000 litres in my lifetime, probably closer to a 140Kl - if you bear in mind the exclusion of those many healthy doses of dash in my youth. If I include my family’s use then we could add another 8 to 15Kl . When they introduce these sweetener containing packages I move to the 1l and have been buying the 500ml cases.

What really ****es me off is that, of the few offerings that are supposed to be "Original taste" and do not list non-nutritive sweetener in the ingredients, the 1l offering has now started containing those very sweeteners instead of just normal sugar. I can taste and suffer the consequences of their presence.

Therefore Coca Cola is guilty of misleading advertising.

I fail to see why I should be paying a premium for sugar substitutes and am seriously hunting for a substitute.