My mother always told me Twinkies were made out of bugs and worms.

They are some mighty fine bugs and worms then!

Mmmm...Twinkies...*drools*

Well, stuff that isn't digested by your body usually doesn't collect... rather, it ends up being excreted. Hence the "anal leakage" reported from large quantities of Olestra.

The people who have the big scarey websites about acesulfame K, sucralose, and aspartame tend to be people who have a problem with just about everything (e.g. the Center for Science in the Public Interest). Doesn't mean they're wrong, just means they're no more credible than Monsanto or other corporate enemy of the day. Personally, I find that aspartame gives me a headache.

Stevia extract, being a plant product, could be as safe as grape juice or as bitter almond oil. Well, if it was the latter we'd probably know by now :-)

I actually had some lemonade sweeted with stevia while at a party with some birkie wearing new age hippie treehuggers this past summer.

It was a stealth offering. Nobody mentioned the stevia until it was too late. (It was part of the plot, apparently).

It was okay, slightly funny aftertaste, but not as bad as that of artificial sweetners.

But I didn't finish the glass, based on taste rather than on fear of side effects.

(i get the nutrasweet headache too ... and the abcramps. not a good time. I'm better off than a friend, though, who is violently allergic to nutrasweet ... ER visit allergic. One day she accidentally had some (package labelling was for aspartame, way down in ingredients list instead of the NS Swirl that you get on most products. She started feeling funny while driving, checked the labelling and found the aspartame ... I grubbed around in her car for some children's benadryl SHE asked for. She took it. Then I read the label ... "um, Shadow ..." "Yeah?" "I think you better pull over." "Why?" "You never read the ingredients in this stuff did you ... " "How can you tell?" "It's got more nutrasweet in it." Luckily the benadryl trumped the additional dosage of aspartame and we made it to our destination without medical intervention.)

I don't drink soda all that often anymore, so it's not that big a deal. Coffee black, tea 1 tsp. of sugar.

I figure 16 calories from 1 tsp. of sugar ain't gonna kill me. What I really need, though, is for someone to produce a commercial unsweetened ice tea. 200 calories per serving (2 servings per container) is ridiculous for an amount of product that I ordinarily would add 2-3 teaspoons of sugar to. It's all part of a greater conspiracy, isn't it.

http://www.b3energy.com/lipo_images/b3_copy.gif

THIS stuff is the real deal. I discovered it at a Korean grocery store (Han Ah Rheum - or Super H). Its a $1.49 and it is much more effective than Red Bull (which isn't that nutritional). When it comes to being completely nutritionless, MountainDew's AMP takes the cake. No vitamin enhancements at all.

I limit myself to four per week because you can get used to these things and they stop working.