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Or get thyself some Stevia. It's a natural sweetener, although it may be a bit of an acquired taste. It rocks in tea, though.

Apparently in Japan, many foods (including Diet Coke) are sweetened with stevia instead of sugar or aspartame. Stevia is a natural herbal sweetener which is something like 300x sweeter than sugar. Unfortunately, as this article says (http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/food/ste via/index.html), it is illegal in North America as a food additive because the FDA and Health Canada have not yet approved it as such. More information about stevia can be found at http://www.stevia.net/

But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone. You are exposing yourself to all kinds of risks you have no idea about. Because the media and the FDA were bought and sold a long time ago.

Couldn't agree more. If you'd like to see an example of just how bought-out the FDA is, check out the story about a sweetener alternative called stevia. Here's a good link to get you started. Stuff like this just gets my blood boiling.

All I see is a bunch of anecdotal cases

this is slashdot, anecdotal cases make up the majority of the "truth" that's to be found here. Things like "Windows is unstable" and "Linux is easy to use" are touted as major "truths" all the time, and if you disagree, you're spreading FUD.

That being said, I don't know if there's been any formal long-term testing of the effects of this poison on the human system. I DO know that the head of the FDA blocked Searle from putting it in the public market for years due to faulty and suspicious testing procedures, and then approved it just a couple of months before he left and started working at Searle for $1.2M/year as a "marketing director". Take what truth from that you want. The of the story vary, but the truth remains.

What amazes me is if MS funds a study for Windows/against anyone, it's not valid. The fact that 74 of Searle and the FDA's studies of aspertame showed absolutely no danges while 92% of the independantly conducted studies showed MANY dangers shouldn't have any effect on truth, right?

I personally have seen the positive effects of ceasing the ingestion of it. My mother's vision had degraded severely over the course of a couple of years. Significantly more than could be attributed to her astigmatism. I suggested she stop downing so much diet soda with aspertame in it, and within 6 months, her vision restored pretty much back to where it should have been. Also, the migraines she'd recently started experiencing also stopped completely. I take more than enough truth from that, anecdotal or not.

That's part of the reason the FDA tries to prevent stevia http://www.stevia.net/fda.htm, a naturally sweet, no-calorie herb, from being marketed in the US as a sweetener. It's a heck of a lot safer than Splenda (which, by the way, has the same health concerns as Nutrasweet got lambasted for a few years back), but the sugar sellers don't want the competition.

Also it can't be patented. Unlike any new artificial sweeteners which may be invented.
Of course the most ironic thing would be if someone were to produce a "low-calorie" sweetener which also acted as a drug to promote weight gain...

There is actually another page on the site that references some of the studies and mentions concerns about its safety http://www.stevia.net/safety.htm. Obviously the site will be biased, but considering how many studies have been done (try googling stevia study), some of which are published in academic journals, and how much it's used in other parts of the world without mention of ill effects, etc, it's relatively believable. I'm not going to bet the farm on it, but I'm interested, anyhow.

That's part of the reason the FDA tries to prevent stevia http://www.stevia.net/fda.htm, a naturally sweet, no-calorie herb, from being marketed in the US as a sweetener. It's a heck of a lot safer than Splenda (which, by the way, has the same health concerns as Nutrasweet got lambasted for a few years back), but the sugar sellers don't want the competition.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration since the mid-1980s has labeled stevia an "unsafe food additive" and gone to extensive lengths to keep it off the U.S. market -- including initiating a search-and-seizure campaign and full-fledged "import alert."

To judge from the extensive measures the FDA has employed to keep Americans in the dark about stevia, one might assume it was some type of dangerous narcotic. But, in fact, no ill effects have ever been attributed to it, although it has been used by millions of people around the world, in some locales for hundreds of years.

So adamant has the FDA remained on the subject, that even though stevia can now be legally marketed as a dietary supplement under legislation enacted in 1994, any mention of its possible use as a sweetener or tea is still strictly prohibited.

Self-organizing, self-optimizing.

Self-subsidizing they purchase a government that passes the laws that prop them up - Sugar (why is the FDA says that Stevia is a bad thing in the US but it is good for diabetics [you know the ones being manufactured by the American Corporate Diet] and it is selling like hotcakes everywhere else), the Steel industry, ADM, the Oil industry, the airlines, argibusiness ("Organic farms are making too much money, Waah! waah, we need the USDA to bend the rules in our favor").

Come on, none of these people, the "Captains of Industry" would not know pure capitalism if it bit them on the ass.

Stevia, a natural herb which is sweeter than sugar and almost calorie-free, is banned in Europe and North America.

Here's something I posted on my site recently:

The November 2003 issue of Wired has an article about artificial sweeteners, tagatose in particular. I was strongly disappointed to find that the article only mentioned stevia once, in passing, and that it was not included in their chart of sweeteners. I would expect Wired, of all publications, to want to be all over something so subversive.

I'm even more disappointed to see no mention of it in this Slashdot discussion.

What about stevia

People who order diet cola aren't necessarily under any illusion that doing so is going to magically make them lose weight. (But wouldn't that be nice?) Some people order it because they have sugar problems that make regular soda a bad idea for them. Others want to drink soda, but don't want to take in around 150 calories per 12 ounce serving...

There are some folks (diabetics) who have issues with sugars. However, they really shouldn't be scarfing cheeseburgers either.

For those who are concerned about calories, well, you've got a priorities issue. The most common artificial sweeteners have been shown to have significant health risks. Meanwhile, the only natural non-caloric sweetener has been agressively kept out of this country by the FDA reportedly at the behest of Monsanto (maker of Nutra-Sweet).

People who order diet cola aren't necessarily under any illusion that doing so is going to magically make them lose weight. (But wouldn't that be nice?) Some people order it because they have sugar problems that make regular soda a bad idea for them. Others want to drink soda, but don't want to take in around 150 calories per 12 ounce serving...

There are some folks (diabetics) who have issues with sugars. However, they really shouldn't be scarfing cheeseburgers either.

For those who are concerned about calories, well, you've got a priorities issue. The most common artificial sweeteners have been shown to have significant health risks. Meanwhile, the only natural non-caloric sweetener has been agressively kept out of this country by the FDA reportedly at the behest of Monsanto (maker of Nutra-Sweet).