Allergy to sweetness

[Bonkerz]

What do you drink? I'm fed up of water.
I'm struggling to find a soft drink that doesn't have nasty sweetness. Even pubs now are serving diet drinks and not giving the choice of paying more for sugared drinks.
Sweetness give me horrendous cramps and diarrhoea almost instantly.
Worse offenders are saccharin and aspartame and phenylalanine

[Andtheresaw]

Do you mean sweeteners?
Since the sugar tax came in on soft drinks lots of manufacturers are reducing the sugar and replacing with some artificial sweeteners.
Have soda with a slice of lemon. Works for me and a fraction of the price :)

[Bonkerz]

I've never been a cola kind of girl anyway but I do enjoy lemonade. I've been buying SAN pellagrino but it's getting more difficult to buy and it's expensive. I got some cordial last week just wondered if there is another option.

[Lookatmemeow]

No sweet drinks are going to be great for either teeth or health but as a treat the bottlegreen cordials are pretty nice and no artificial sweeteners.

[Bonkerz]

Sorry yes I mean sweetners. I've never been able to have sugar free or diet drinks but now my choice is even less as rather than making me pay more with sugar tax my choice is being taken away

[DomesticAnarchist]

Phenylalanine isn't a sweetener. It's an amino acid that is in all of the protein you eat in varying quantities.

Aspartame is a source of phenylalanine when it's digested. This is important only for people with PKU (which you would know if you had). That's the ONLY reason it's labelled as "contains a source of phenylalanine".

There are many, many sweeteners. They can't possibly ALL have this effect on you. I haven't seen saccharin in anything since the 90s, I'm sure.

Sucralose is fine. Stevia is fine. Xylitol and Malitol will give you the shits if you have enough of them.

BTW San Pellegrino has a new recipe with sweetener in (But it's not aspartame).

But by all means, please object to the sugar tax, start a petition, it's a right ball-ache for people with PKU (and they've got enough issues with NHS funding and ill-informed GPs already).

Sorry for the tone. This stuff pisses me off more than it should. I'll go and find a hobby...

[DomesticAnarchist]

I'm disappointed with my use of "ball-ache". I need a less gendered alternative. Suggestions welcome

[JellySlice]

How about juice and soda? I'm partial to pineapple and soda or grapefruit and soda.

[Bubbaduck]

Fever Tree. Their cola and lemonade are both lovely and no artificial sweeteners. Fentimans is nice too, had both their cloudy lemonade and rose lemonade so far. I get bad headaches with artificial sweeteners and they've been a joy to find as I was left with only Coke after everything else changed its recipe with the sugar tax.

[RedTulip86]

I reverted to home made lemonade- sugar, lemon, lime and fizzy water. I don’t go out and if I did I’d rather stick to water or orange juice