Splenda is the devil

So, yesterday I got diagnosed with diabetes.

Obviously, with something like that I'm going to have to make a few changes in my lifestyle, but as I sat and thought about it today, there's not really anything that's going to be all that hard.

Basically, I've never been a fan of sweet stuff. I can easily live without chocolate or candy and the things I do like I just have to cut back on, not cut out completely.

I thought about it and there are only three things that are going to be even close to difficult. I loves me some bread and potatoes, but that is something I can still eat, just not as much. I drank a hell of a lot of soda, but that just means a switch to diet instead of regular…

Tea, on the other hand, is a different story.

I'm a dyed in the wool Brit. I drink my tea hot with plenty of milk and sugar... I also drink a hell of a lot of it. I've drank tea with three heaped teaspoons of sugar at least four or five times a day since I was old enough to hold a cup.

Last night I grabbed my mug and said to Sunny "Oh well, now I get to see if I can convince myself to like unsweetened tea."

"There's some Splenda in the cupboard." Sunny said, helpfully. "Try that."

Splenda….

In the ads the slogan is "It tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar!"

If Splenda tastes like sugar, a dirty hobo's underpant scrapin's taste like chocolate sprinkles.

The first thing that shocks you is just the way it looks. On the ads it looks just like sugar…in real life, however, it looks like shredded packing peanuts mixed with bleached belly-button fluff. Also, you know the way when you drop a spoonful of sugar into a hot drink it just kinda sinks and dissolves? Well Splenda doesn't do that. If you want to see what it actually does, go watch any film where a femme fatale tips a powder from a hidden compartment in her ring into the hero's drink. I wish I was joking. The stuff fizzles the second it comes into contact with the liquid and vanishes instantly.

As for the taste, let me describe it this way.

One and a half spoons in a normal sized cup of tea applies so little sweetness you won't know it's there. Exactly one and a half spoons plus one extra granule is like getting force-fed a fifty pound bag of sugar dissolved in maple syrup…which is then washed down with industrial strength pool-cleaner. Go mix one part sugar with two parts power-steering fluid to get a sense of how chemically nasty it tastes.

So, I guess I take tea without sweetner now.