What ingredient in diet drinks provides the one calorie? Why do some diet drinks have one calorie and some have no calories?

undudelike

Many ingredients are used to give a cola "one" calorie. Actually they do not have one calorie. This is used as a marketing ploy. The Federal government allows manufacturers of diet colas to advertise if they have fewer than five calories. They are known as artificial sweeteners. They have zero or one calorie based on the amount of artificial sweetners in it. Again it is mostly a marketing ploy. In the United States Diet Pepsi is marketed as having no calories, as FDA guidelines allow products with fewer than five calories per serving to be labeled as containing zero calories. PepsiCo also markets low-calorie colas known as Pepsi Max and Pepsi ONE. When Diet Pepsi was introduced, it originally contained one calorie (just like Pepsi ONE) until the late '90s. Then it was marked to having zero calories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_Pepsi Aspartame is an artificial sweetener and is approximately 200 times sweeter than sucrose, or table sugar. Due to this property, though aspartame upon metabolism produces 4 kilocalories of energy per gram, the quantity of aspartame needed to produce a sweet taste is so small that its caloric contribution is negligible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame Dec 02 10, 3:43 PM