Comment by kalleboo
20 hours ago
When I was a kid I thought it was insane that my dad watered down orange juice as he thought it was too sweet. Now that I'm nearing his age at the time, I water down my cola (with plain carbonated water) since I find it too sweet. So I would chalk it up to changes in your taste over changes in the product.
I too thought it was my palate and perhaps it's partially so, but it's also more than that. We're now in an era of 'engineered sweetness' to maximize sales.
Since around the 1970s food manufacturers have been increasing the sweetness of products to keep up with the population's shifting/increasing "bliss point". The "bliss point" is defined as the optimal sweetness of a product and it's been increasing over time from the constant bombardment of ultra refined food products. It seems we've adapted to the ready availability of readily available sweet stuff and now we need more to satisfy.
Decades ago, very sweet products weren't encountered to the same extent as today so the bliss point remained essentially static but in recent years as the average bliss point has increased manufacturers have increased the sweetness of products to compensate. There are many references to this, here's but one:
https://www.foodtimes.eu/consumers-and-health/bliss-effect-u...
Re Coke, when I was a kid, its sweetness depended to some extent on how it was obtained. Soda fountains before modern post mixing varied the radio of Coke syrup to soda which changed the perceived sweetness, also I believe in some countries the syrup came sans sugar (or largely so) to save on transport costs and was bottled (sugar ratios mixed) locally. This arrangement allowed local bottling to set the optimal bliss point for that market.
I remember kids whose parents owned a soda fountain could get the syrup and we'd mix it with soda to suit.
Incidentally, I'm in Australia and here the bottled Coke tastes different to what I've tasted in the US (could be sucrose versus fructose or sucrose/fructose mixtures as sucrose is usually the key sweetener used here).
More to the point, I've friends in New York and several of them have complained to me that they consider their local product not up to scratch and they prefer Coke that's bottled in Mexico whenever they can get it.
I cannot recall whether the Mexican Coke was sweeter or not, or if there was some other difference. Reason: whenever I ate with them they drank Coke whilst I stuck to beer.
I think it was that most of us coke had sirup, while mexican and most of the world uses cane sugar.