Anyone know why they’re so hard to find here? You can’t find it at the regular px mart/carrefour at all, and must go to special baking stores for it, but even there it’s hard to find sugar substitutes (the selection is piss poor and there’s only one type to be found).
Is it because of regulation?
I tried ordering a few fake sugars online, but I ended up crawling back to the supermarket for a big bag of Taisugar. The real thing.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Maybe use like 1/10th the sugar you normally use and make up for the rest with sugar subs.
The whole goal is to not drink carbs… and sugar is particularly bad because your body doesn’t know when to stop.
Tell me about it. I just got a rotten wisdom tooth pulled and vowed to give it up, lasted exactly one week. First it was a little chocolate. Then I got gifted some Earl Grey tea, which I believe benefits from a teaspoon or two of sugar. Then I ran into the puffed rice dude on the way home on the weekend, and he had that black sugar puffed barley. Then… well, you get the picture.
The problem is there’s no middle ground in Taiwan. With tea or other sweet stuff it’s either sugar bomb or no sugar. There’s no “diet bubble tea” out there, or rather none of the major chains have come up with it yet. Like 50 boils their bubbles in sugar, but they could have just used like 1/3 the sugar they normally use without messing with the taste of the bubbles. And maybe they could put in a tiny amount of aspertime into the tea itself to make it just as sweet as full sweet tea but without the huge amount of calories.
Maybe the reason is Taitang. They make sugar so cheap nobody wants anything else.
You see the huge boxes of sugar getting delivered to the bubble tea shops, they go through it. There was a decent range of sugar choice at 50 last time I went though. They are among the sweeter chains from memory, I think micro sugar (微糖) is what I would order there.
In the diet thread I posted the link to the shopping site to buy the packets of equal sugar substitute. I carry mine in a small tin or just put a few in my pocket for the day.
Those equal sugar subs are not cheap at all. Actually those are better bought in bulk because I guarantee you there’s about 20nt worth of chemical sweeteners in it, for a product they charge 500nt for.
Actually I was just thinking about what you said a bit more. I think the Taiwan FDA has pulled up food producers on artificial sweeteners in the past. Remember a while back they were testing all the Taiwan dried fruits, like dried guava, those packs you buy at the markets or supermarket. They found cyclamate and all manner of artificial sweeteners in there, and some people got into trouble. I’m not sure what is banned and what is permitted for use here. And sugar is cheap.
They sell cyclamate here too, at least on Ruten, but in large packs and not at all cheap either.
Coke zero use a mix of cyclamate and aspertime as sweetener.
It isn’t illegal, what’s illegal is including them in food items without labeling them. Selling some “natural sweet powder, no chemical sweeteners” when it contains aspertime is definitely not legal.
I wonder who would have a need for such a large amount?
Maybe for baking. They use lots of sugar and can really benefit from sugar subs.
Or maybe for snake oil salesman who sells these natural sweet powder, no artificial sweeteners, and it’s basically cyclamate.
Just buy at Shopee
I put 2 packs in my coffee for less than $3nt. 2 packs work fine for my tea as well. I don’t use sweeteners for anything else food related.
I use equal to keep sugars away from my teeth and too many calories that might make me fat
Interesting, I was reading on its wikipedia entry, cyclamate has an off taste, and this is commonly masked by mixing with saccharin. Apparently they both have off tastes and mask each other’s off taste.
Yea even sweet and low is mixed with stuff, like dexterose or something because of the off taste. But I kinda hate sugar’s aftertaste, it has a really sour aftertaste that lingers for a long time. This is another reason to want to use sugar subs.
I’m the opposite. Sugar is the only sweetness I find acceptable.
Yea it looks like you got a sugar addiction then.
My only advise is to use less sugar, like maybe half of what you normally use, and make up for the lower sweetness with splenda or truvia or other “natural” sugar based artificial sweetener. Or chemical sweeteners.
So I suppose artificial sweeteners are like nicotine patches. After using them for a while, I presume your body just unlearns the link between the sweet taste and the adrenaline, or whatever makes you feel good after consuming sugar. Ultimately you’ll probably just leave off them and sugar completely.
Or rather reduce the concentration/amount of sugar you consume a day
I mean for example if you are eating candy all the time, that might be where you should look to reduce it, as candy is REALLY sweet and tends to cause tooth problem… but unfortunately they are also not the easiest thing to replace with artificial sweeteners.