It's true: Diet Pepsi tastes like the run off from a VX gas plant. I've never tried the Caffeine-free version...I've never had the courage.

No sugar, no caffeine - of what possible use would there be for imbibing this dreck?

Is water not vogue enough for some?

Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi is the only soda my Grandma ever kept in the refrigerator. I wouldn't drink the stuff now if you paid me, but I'll always associate it's distinctive odor with spending time at her house.

I love rants like this. Not that I drink the stuff. I just like funny rants. That's me, easy to please.

but its got electrolytes!

I'm amazed people drink it by choice.

I LOVE Diet Pepsi... with caffeine. Otherwise, what's the point?

I gotta agree. As foul as most caff-free diet pop is, the Pepsi variant is über-foul. Would-rather-drink-my-own-Britta-filtered-urine foul.

I drank diet colas for 20 years and they skewed my sense of taste completely.

Just stop drinking pepsi, coke and all the copy cat crap habitually, whether sweetened with aspartame or sugar, and within a few months you won’t miss them.

I have friends who drink this stuff like water. Two or three 2-litres per day.

If I drink more than one or two glasses I start getting headaches and my lower back (around my kidney area) starts to hurt.

But seeing as how it tastes like ass, I don't feel like I'm missing much.

Soooo, he didn't like it?

just skip ALL sodas
http://www.mccookgazette.com/story/1232311.html

Diet Pepsi is delicious. I like the taste of it much, much better than I like the taste of regular Pepsi or Coke. It tastes like clean.

My heart now belongs to Coke Zero, however.

Most diet sodas are terrible. That's why they have to lie so much in the TV comercials. It's for people who are addicted to soda and think regular soda makes them fat so they drink this shit all day.Just stop drinking so much freaking soda. Then you can enjoy a regular one with sugar every once in a while and not worry about it making you fat. I mean, how fat is regular soda going to make you anyway?

Not only does it taste bad...but my mom drank that crap daily for years...several cans a day...and died of pancreatic cancer. Coincidence?! I THINK NOT!

Graham Norton on Slimfast: Try bulimia. It's cheaper and it tastes better.

Whatever happened to eating food instead of lab experiments?

@ #14:

Well, I stopped drinking my 60 ounces of Coke and Mountain Dew a day a month ago. No other real changes to my diet or exercise routine.

I've lost ten pounds.

I've also found extra money in my pocket at the end of the week, so that's a bonus.

And heeeeere come the aspartame conspiracy theorists! ...That being said, I don't think drinking 2 or 3 liters a day of any chemical slurry can possibly be good for you.

I like Diet Coke. Yes, it tastes diet-y, but that's part of its charm for me. I don't drink it because I'm trying to lose weight (if I want something sugary I go for a Jones Soda), I genuinely enjoy the taste.

Caffeine-Free though? Now that's just sad.

moderation, moderation, moderation in all things (except me, here) It is astounding what poisons we can survive, what excesses we can endure,so long as you give your body just half a chance to catch up and recover. Try everything, be addicted to nothing.

A third of the world's population can't get potable water but we come up with something that not only tastes like you sucked it through a hose connected to a sewage main, but can make you obese, induce headaches and in large enough doses, contributes to the development of diabetes. God Bless The USA!

I recall seeing a skit on some comedy show in the early 80's ("The New Show" maybe?) where they invented a cola they called "Okra Cola" that actually made part of your body paralyzed. They marketed the paralysis as "That Okra Cola FEELING!"

In some countries they just DON'T like cola drinks-- I've heard it described as "the taste of sweat" in some cultures.

Many people, and I'm among them, cannot stand the taste of aspartame. Many other people don't dislike it, it's a matter of taste.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

my diet routine is simple. Keep it at about 1500 calories a day avoid fat if possible, avoid Hi fructose corn syrup like the plague, walk five miles per day.

I've been dropping a pound a week for 4 months, and that includes cheating a bit on weekends.

Diet soda for most people is bad news because your body detects something sweet, and then finds you've ripped it off, and it ups your hunger level.

I still have the occasional coke zero cause part of dealing with my diet has been learning to enjoy hunger.

#17: "I've also found extra money in my pocket at the end of the week, so that's a bonus."

Dude. I put that there.

Now that you've kicked the soda habit and lost that weight, I'd like it back so I can help someone else.

I love Caffiene Free Diet Pepsi.

It's better than Cats.

I'm going to drink it again and again.

Years ago, I read that we all taste things differently, and that research showed that the largest single taste abberation was that approximately one-fourth of everyone found saccharin to taste bitter rather than sweet... one reason why Fresca tasted like grapefruit -- so that it tasted the same bitter to everyone.

Among those 25% who have that major tasting difference, 10% of them found aspartame tastes metallic (again, rather than sweet).

Guess which 2.5% of the world's population I'm in?

I find the new stuff (sucralose -- Splenda) tastes like nothing. It just is there as something. It neither tastes sweet nor like anything beyond a mass of substance.

I just avoid both artificial sweetened anything and try to avoid corn syrup in stuff, too.

I'll take sugar as sugar, and in low quantities, please.

@21

http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/sherrys/imgs/e/a/ea19715f.jpg

Crap, just drink water for crying out loud. It's better for you, the environment, and small farmers who have to compete with corporate agribusinesses that want to turn all farms into petroleum sucking, government subsidized corn factories. Boycott corn in all forms except the on-the-cob form (that includes eating feedlot meat).

Still, the rant is funny.

why the rant? so, DON'T drink it, already. sheesh!

I have an ex-coworker who lives on this stuff. She was persistently drunk at work (and stank of booze the whole time), smoked like a chimney and tanned almost to leather, but the most strange and disturbing thing about her was her utter devotion to Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi.

she'll live to a hundred

if you dont like it - dont drink it. whats the fuckin' point? boinboing - are you alive?

People, use your brains...there are those that drink diet sodas because their bodies can't handle the sugar. As to the taste, yes it's a personal thing. I know some people who say that root beer tastes like medicine! Now that is warped.

Diet soda is associated with metabolic syndrome, which includes diabetes. Ooops. Back to water.

what water? how is the tap water where you live?

Fresh from the aquifer. Not even chlorinated. So full of calcium that you don't even need a glass.

the Ogallala?

Heh...asian shit ant.

Personally, I'd go for dishwater. There's -something- in it, it's clearly -not- water, whatever's in it -doesn't- taste good, but it's unclear exactly -what- it is.

Whether we're drinking water or soda, the fluoride in both is making us all stupid with brain damages.

Funny. I'd say the same thing about the taste of beer, wine, sake or really any alcoholic beverages. Soda on the other hand doesn't have to rot before it can be consumed. I don't have a problem with the taste of diet Pepsi other than it's just boring. I'll take a Jones Soda any day.

Franko: Because the rant's a thing of beauty in its own right.

June (18): some of us aren't aspartame conspiracy theorists. Some of us have neurology that doesn't get along with aspartame at all.

the Ogallala?

We have our own natural underground basins. My old neighborhood uses creek water, but that's chlorinated. Not as thick and creamy, though.

Diet Pepsi is foul to start with. Caffine-free? WHY???

Diet Coke for the win. Most sugared drinks, (particularly with nasty HFCS) are way too sweet for my taste. Favourite is Diet Barq's Root Beer, followed by Diet Coke and Diet Dr Pepper.

The rant is funny simply for way it's presented, but I do hope it's just done as a bit of satire.

It always surprises me a little to encounter people who really are that furious at such innocuous parts of our everyday world. As was said above, if you don't like the Pepsi, don't drink it. It's just a soda, after all.

Personally, I rather like the taste of Diet Coke sweetened with Splenda instead of Nutrasweet. Coke Zero is also tasty in a somewhat odd way.

As if Coca Cola Light ('Just for the taste of it, Coca Cola Light') is any better. I'm not sure what is put in there, but it does not taste like cola.

Same for Coca Cola Black:
When I was in the States, I got a free bottle of Coca Cola Black, when visiting a mall, and me being a Dutch guy (we love our freebies), wanted very much to like it. But after just one sip I was cured of by thirst for decades to come. I took one more to be certain that I didn't like the stuff, and hey, it was free! :)
Then I threw away the bottle in a trash can that was overflowing with rather full bottles of Coca Cola Black.

Aspartame (most fake-sugars) basically becomes wood-alcohol in your body. Causes bloating, and in people with a sensitivity, headaches (my brother gets a migraine from a stick of sugar-free gum, but we have an rather normal abnormality of the lower brain/brain-stem that runs in our family, that allows massive headaches to form easier).

What exactly is conspiracy-theorist about the anti-aspartame crowd?

I'm lucky, fake sugar tastes basically normal to me and doesn't cause side effects. I love me some Pepsi-One!

I like it with a twist of lime. I like sugar free A&W; root beer best.

Not only is this poison terrible for your body (it causes a "body burden" for your organs to digest this overly processed chemical), but the bottles it comes in take more water to produce than the amount of liquid in the bottle. The bottles are made of plastic, which is a petroleum product (oil), and the plastic leaches into your "beverage" and interacts with all the other chemicals. Drink up!

"...and the plastic leaches into your 'beverage' and interacts with all the other chemicals."

That's why I only drink Mt. Dew from a can. Mmmm...aluminum.

For those who didn't click the link above, an excerpt:

----------
.... Ravi Dhingra, M.D., lead author of the study and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "If you are drinking one or more soft drinks a day, you may be increasing your risk of developing metabolic risk factors for heart disease."

The Framingham study included nearly 9,000 person observations made in middle-aged men and women over four years at three different times.

In a "snapshot in time" at baseline, the researchers found that individuals consuming one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent increased prevalence of the metabolic syndrome compared to those consuming less than one soft drink daily.
------------------
And

High Fructose Diet Increases Triglycerides in Healthy Lean Young ... The high fructose diet resulted in significant increases in fasting plasma concentrations of triglyceride and leptin after one week, ...
www.diabeteshealth.com/read/2007/04/09/5077.html

And

High cola consumption linked to kidney disease
Drinking more than two servings of cola a day more than doubled the likelihood of having chronic kidney disease...
www.healthcentral.com/incontinence/news-43536-66.html

do not drink soda . poison.\

ANKH, please. Medical researchers refute each other on a regular basis. In a month or two that same physician will be telling us if we don't have a Diet-Coke at least once a day, our livers will fall out.

I popped into a smoke shop to get a newspaper the other day. While there, I grabbed a bottle of Diet-Coke and the owner went into this NUT-CASE rant about the evils of aspartame (similar to ANKH's clippings.) This happens while he's literally surrounded by every possible tobacco product on the planet. I called him on this and he had ANOTHER rant that tobacco and smoke issues were not scientifically proven.

Short story: I read him to filth, tossed his paper at him and walked out.

Check the cite, and you can follow forward in time as studies cite and add to what's known.

Check the footnotes, and you can go back to the previous studies.

Never rely on a single study or the latest work. Look at the pattern of research over time.

If you have any credible source to support your belief that "Medical researchers refute each other on a regular basis" please give a citation.

If you find a recantation next month, do post that.

Cites help tell the trolls from the readers. Prove yourself.