Published Jun 27, 2003
My latest purchase: low-fat cranberry juice sweetened with this stuff called Splenda. It’s apparently made directly from sugar, but doesn’t contain a lot of the stuff in sugar. This being the first time that I realized that sugar contained anything besides, well, sugar.
I’m sketchy about the whole low-fat thing. Eating healthy is all about making the right choices, and making low-fat products only allows us to avoid making those choices. And then, when low-fat is not convenient, we don’t know how to exercise restraint and eat right. My friend, for example. He’s been trying to lose weight since high school! Half his diet is low-fat Healthy Choice or Weight Watchers pasta. And, each time I see him eat pasta, he puts about a quarter cup or Kraft Parmesan Cheese on it. See? Bad choices from bad fundamentals.
So I usually avoid reduced-fat, trying to eat instead things that are fundamentally low in fat. But, I’ve got this wack-ass diet in which I can’t have (among other things) corn syrup. And let me tell you, everything’s sweetened with corn syrup. Mustard, even. So I get a lot of diet stuff, because it’s all sweetened with NutraSweet or some such.
Now, I hate NutraSweet. I can taste it in food, and it tastes, to me, kinda like dirt. So diet soda is sweet and sandy. Sandy’s fun for nobody. Unless it’s that girl Sandy from college — yowza! I jumped on that Splenda-sweetened juice, and it’s not bad. A little cloying and lacking in depth of favor. Moderately acceptable. There’ll be more Splenda in my life, at least for the next month or so.