A Diet I Can Actually Detect

I know a lot of people don’t drink diet soda out of concerns about the dangers of artificial sweeteners. I still drink diet soda anyway. For the most part, I’ve never really been able to tell much of a difference. Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Zero. Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero. I just never really notice which is which, absent weight gain from the calories in the corn syrup if I don’t end up drinking the diet versions. Heck, I don’t even notice that much difference between Coke and Pepsi. I’m sure it’s there, but I don’t notice it.

However, I finally did try a diet soda for which I could tell the difference. Diet Mountain Dew.

I’ve never really wanted to try it before, but it was sitting in front of me the other day so I had one. It was fine as a drink, but it just didn’t taste anything like Mountain Dew. I don’t mean that it didn’t taste sweet, or even as sweet to me, just that it didn’t seem to have much of a Mountain Dew flavor. That seemed weird.

After all, sweetness aside, shouldn’t the flavor come from sodium citrate or something? Some sort of citrus chemical? Mountain Dew is sweet and all, and I know that’s the corn syrup, but the citrus flavor of Mountain Dew doesn’t come from the sugar…does it?

I don’t know what it was, but Diet Mountain Dew didn’t taste much like Mountain Dew to me. Maybe I was just off that day, and it was a fine enough thing to drink, but it just didn’t seem like Mountain Dew at all. I didn’t really understand.