Sugar is quietly disappearing from soft drinks as industry swaps it for sweeteners

The usual Fanta now contains sweeteners: goodbye to sugar
Mixing a sangría with lemon Fanta and noticing it tastes off is not your imagination: the recipe has changed. Consumers buying the "regular one we've always had" now find sweeteners on the ingredients list. And it's not just Fanta: Kas, Schweppes, Aquarius and much of the soft drink market have met the same fate. Outside Asia, finding a fizzy drink with neither sugar nor sweeteners is nearly impossible, as someone who has visited 90 countries found out.

Why sugar has vanished from the formula
The explanation is not a conspiracy, but two cost variables and one marketing factor. Sugar prices have jumped more than 60% from one month to the next, with sharp fluctuations that complicate any production planning. Sweeteners, by contrast, are cheaper, take up a fraction of the warehouse space and allow companies to sell the idea of a "lower-calorie" product without changing the taste too much. On top of this comes the sugar-sweetened beverage tax levied on sugar in several countries, Spain included.

The switch has been made quietly. No one announces on the main label that the long-standing formula is no longer the same; consumers find out by reading the ingredients or, quite simply, by tasting it. An industrial supplier sums up the operation: sell fewer calories and spend less on sugar. Nothing more to it.

Sucralose, acesulfame K and the antiestéticar of what we don't understand
The sweeteners appearing most often are sucralose (E955) and acesulfame K (E950). Warnings have been published linking them to migraines, muscle pain, digestive discomfort and inflammation; E950 also contains methylene chloride, a compound suspected of harm in occupational exposure. But sugar doesn't come out clean either: refined sugar is a laboratory product in its own way, and excess consumption is linked to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.

Some argue that "sugar grows on trees", as if the industry bottled it straight from the field. The reality is that both sugar and sweeteners are processed, and the most rational choice, absent scientific consensus, is to cut back on both. Antiestéticar of E950 coexists with the scepticism of those who point out that everything that isn't water goes through some chemical process.

Alternatives: from homemade lemonade to soda water
The practical answer to the problem is no mystery: sparkling water, soda siphons, iced tea and homemade lemonade. One lemon yields about 250 ml of juice; with three lemons, a litre of water and three tablespoons of brown sugar you get a lemonade in a minute. Tea or herbal infusions also work cold: just leave them in the fridge for 24 hours.

There is also the regulatory route. In the European Union, a product labelled "juice" cannot contain added sugar or sweeteners; "nectar" can. So it's worth reading the label before assuming a fruit drink is healthy. The "mad max" option of mixing an infusion with soda water is perfectly valid, and wine with soda, that forgotten classic, contains neither sugar nor sweeteners.

Meanwhile, the industry keeps cashing in on "zero sugar" as an achievement. The irony is that the war on sugar has been won by a handful of E-numbers with unpronounceable names. And sangría, of course, no longer tastes like it used to.