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From: peters@cubsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: NutraSweet + Saccharin in Diet Coke
Message-ID: <117@cubsvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Nov-83 13:16:31 EST
Article-I.D.: cubsvax.117
Posted: Fri Nov 25 13:16:31 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Nov-83 04:41:11 EST
Organization: Columbia Univ Biology, New York City
Lines: 24




Michael Bishop asked why the Coke folks put both NutraSweet and
saccharin in their diet-Coke.  The answer is simple.  NutraSweet
tastes much more like sugar than saccharin, lacking the bitter 
after-taste, but is many times more expensive on an equal-
sweetness basis.  (By that I mean that to get the same amount of
sweetness you need ten or twenty times more NutraSweet than 
saccharin, not necessarily by weight, but by dollar-value.)  So
what Coke is trying to do is to decrease the amount of saccharin 
only to the point where most people won't be able to detect the
bitter after-taste, which, below a certain level, gets lost in
the other flavors.  This, they feel, will enable them to produce
a superior product than the all-saccharin formulation at a lower
cost than the all-aspartame (=NutraSweet) formulation.

Two additional comments:  aspartame is pretty amazing.  The 
sugar substitute called "Equal" gets most of its sweetness from it,
and tastes almost just like sucrose -- a little sweeter, in some sense.
It's also quite a curiosity chemically, since it's a polypeptide, not
a carbohydrate.  One of the few sweet polypeptides, I believe.
 
Peter S. Shenkin (cubsvax!peters)