I really like soda, especially the kinds with lots of caffeine and sugar. However, I have minor panic attacks whenever I drink them and think about all the corn syrup and other scary junk that goes into the soda flowing through my body. On the other hand I can't stand diet sodas - whose chemicals won't make me fat and diabetic (and probably take a lot longer to insidiously wreck the body) but taste like crap.

So why do they taste like crap?!

A group from my own campus (The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), has come up with some methods to determine why diet sodas suck.

Consumers may claim they don't like diet soda because of artificial sweeteners, but Schmidt and sensory scientist Lee think people are also influenced by a subtle difference called "mouth-feel." Think body, fullness, thickness; regular soda contains high-fructose corn syrup, diet soda doesn't.

What makes these scientists think mouth-feel is the culprit? For one thing, artificial sweeteners have been greatly improved and extensively studied. "Taste profiles for artificial sweeteners now closely match the one for sucrose, which humans describe as the perfect sweetness," Lee said.

But the most compelling piece of evidence is the verdict of Lee's sensory panel--12 people trained for four weeks to use a 15-point scale in order to rate the characteristics that contribute to the mouth-feel of diet and regular soda. Lee called her panelists "highly trained instruments" because they could detect significant differences in the mouth-feel of 14 samples that the scientist's super-sensitive lab instruments identified as very, very small.

Too bad they haven't found a non-toxic ingredient to replace all the bad ones in order to attain the same "mouth feel" as a regular soda.

Before I leave you with this exciting new information I thought I'd give you this last little quote;
"The human mouth cavity appears to be a super-rheometer (the lab instrument that measures viscosity or thickness)"

A mouth cavity?! sounds like the author is talking about a huge alien demon mouth ready to engulf Tokyo.