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The Taste of Sweet
Filed under: Dessert, Artificial Sugars, Chocolate, Candy, Books, Baking, Sugar, Guilty Pleasures  Journalist Joanne Chen, an unabashed, lifelong lover of sweets, had a hard time understanding why that's not the universal reaction. In The Taste of Sweet, she examines the physical, psychological and historical relationship between sweet flavors and humans, and discovers some pretty extraordinary things about our tongues, brains, societal perceptions, and why some folks will always have room for dessert.
Read her 10 Surprising Facts About Our Relationship with Sweets, take her Are You A Supertaster Quiz and come back...
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EU won't ban additives from food
Filed under: Science, Trans Fats, Artificial Sugars, Newspapers, Europe  Despite urges from various British food organizations, the European Food Safety Authority decided against banning additives in food.
Their reasoning? A recent £750,000 study, which found a link between eating food loaded with additives and colorants and impulsive/hyperactive behavior in kids, was not a substantial enough reason to ban the additives entirely. In the study, eight and nine year olds who had ingested food with additives could not sit still long enough to complet simple tasks, like a 15-minute computer exercise. (Yeah, but neither could most of the eight year olds I know, with or...
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The best in offensive, stereotypical Irish food products
Filed under: Artificial Sugars, Candy, America, Celebrations, St. Patrick's Day  It's that time of year - a week of green-tinted beer, green-tinged bagels, and an overabundance of green streamers and shamrock-shaped accessories and five dollar Old Navy shirts with clovers prominently displayed on the chest.
What would St. Patrick's Day be without our bizarre, Americanized version of a culture we apparently know very little about? It is our job, as Americans, to mock and exploit the Irish culture by upholding commonly-held stereotypes. And the best way to do this? Through these five products.
Oh: and as a person with a good amount of...
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Aspartame may be sweet but it isn't good
Filed under: Science, Artificial Sugars, Did you know?, Health & Medical  There's a lot of research coming out about artificial sweeteners and how they are not good for you. I had heard unsubstantiated claims about aspartame a long time ago, but I did not know this. Did you know that aspartame was at one time listed as a biochemical warfare agent by the pentagon? What?!
I guess that's why it took eight years for the FDA to approve it's use, and only then though political pressure (or so I was informed). And no wonder the FDA didn't want to approve it. Research, both...
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Taste Test: Thomas Kemper Low Calorie Root Beer
Filed under: Artificial Sugars, New Products, America, Soda, Light Food  I have always been a fan of root beer. When my sister and I were kids, our intake of sugary drinks was actively monitored by our mom and so there wasn't much in the way of soda in our house. When we'd go out to eat, my dad would often get a root beer while we had to content ourselves with milk. We'd beg for sips from his glass on those occasions and so I associate root beer with comfortable family outings and special treats.
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Diet soda no better for you than regular
Filed under: Artificial Sugars, Newspapers, America, Soda, Sugar, Health & Medical  For years, people have thought that diet soda was the way to go if you wanted to cut down on the sugar and calories that come with regular soda. Apparently, they are now finding that it might not be such a safe choice after all. Researchers have now determined that drinking one soda a day, whether it's diet or regular, is associated with a much higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.
They've associated regular, sugar-sweetened soda, with those health concerns for years, but this is the first...
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Mexico creates Guinness-worthy cake for Mother's Day
Filed under: Dessert, Artificial Sugars, Food Oddities, Super Size Me, Mexico  A team of Mexican bakers made a massive, sweet gesture toward madres and abuelitas across that country last Thursday. But the only thing sweet about the 2.2 metric ton celebration of Mother's Day is the fact that it was a cake. The gigantic dessert was made entirely with zero-calorie sweetener rather than sugar.
The heart-shaped cake was 16-feet wide and fed about 150 mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. And just how much artificial sweetener does it take to make an enormous blue-and-yellow cake? A tad over 200 pounds. Of course you'll also need 23 bakers, 881 pounds of...
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Is Splenda causing side effects?
Filed under: Artificial Sugars, Sugar, Health & Medical  Citizens for Health, a national consumer group, is concerned that the artificial sweetener Splenda is causing side effects and making consumers ill. Though it isn't stated which specific side effects people are experiencing, the group is lobbying for additional research to be conducted on sucralose, the sweetening component of Splenda.
Merisant, the makers of Equal and NutraSweet, believe that the company which makes Splenda, McNeil Nutritionals, is misleading the public with their tagline "made from sugar so it tastes like sugar."
The Chairman of Citizens for Health, Jim Turner, has stated, "I encourage consumers to contact us if...
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Sugar free Peeps?
Filed under: Artificial Sugars, New Products  Peeps are soft, fluffy little mounds of sugary goodness that are absolutely the best around Easter, although Just Born is continuously expanding their line in an effort to include all major holidays. Usually, this expansion manifests itself in the form of new colors, like the bright green Peeps that are popping into stores for St. Patrick's Day, but sometimes they try to do something a little different, as they did when they release the cocoa-flavored bunny peeps a few weeks ago. Their latest release, however, omits what has traditionally been the most important part of the Peep: the sugar. Sugar-Free Peeps are the newest...
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16 packets of sugar a day can't be good for me
Filed under: Teas, Artificial Sugars, Sugar  But that's what I eat every single day. And I'm only counting the tea I drink, not actual food.
I'm not a coffee drinker, I'm a tea drinker, so I'm probably healthy in that way, since tea has been proven to have many good health benefits. And I use fat free milk in my tea too. But the sugar. Oh, the sugar. I have 4 packets in each cup of tea that I make, and I have around 4 cups a day. That can't be good for me, can it? (And that's an average day - there have been some days when I've...
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