I’m with @Lurka the sweetened Huel is just unbearably sweet. I don’t have an issue with sweet (I could live on Pavlova) but I have an issue with the synthetic sweetness of Sucralose. Not to blow my own trumpet, but I have a pretty refined palette sense of smell, I think this makes the unnatural sweetening of sucralose stand out so much. With the one bag of sweetened I bought (and binned in the end) I did some tests and my wife was fine with it as was my youngest child, my eldest was actually sick! Strangely I have no issue with Aspartame, I can taste its a chemical and not real sugar but it isn’t sickly sweet.
Been on the unsweetened now for the best part of three months and mostly add nothing to it, sure it’s beginning to get a little boring but it does have a good basic taste and texture - plus two shakes and it mixes, the flavoured stuff is basically waterproof. If I needed the sweet I think Honey would be a good additive but it’s pretty sweet with nothing in.
I’ve read most of the anti-sweetener rhetoric before and it is worrying (though probably overexcited) but as @Lorca says why add chemicals or chemically enhanced substances to food when there are natural alternatives
Because everything is a “chemical”, and your definition of “natural” is fairly arbitrary, granulated sugar is as natural as aspartame, stevia, sucralose, hfcs, saccharin, etc, etc. You just need to be aware of what each substance does the best you can.
If you don’t like the taste that’s fair enough, but you should re-evaluate your conception of the word natural. And if it really matters after all, there’s lots of things in nature which as they exist in nature will kill you, we just learned with experience to stay away from them.
I know everything is a chemical, my definition of natural is stuff you can find in nature (hence the word natural), stuff that hasn’t been “improved” by the intervention of a laboratory. We could get into whether stuff is still natural once it’s been cooked etc, but I’m just talking common sense, non extreme definition of the word.
Quoting from a food site article on sucralose it says “While the process to make sucralose begins with sucrose, or table sugar, the final product is different from sugar. Sucralose is made by replacing three select hydrogen-oxygen groups on the sugar molecule with three chlorine atoms, resulting in an intensely sweet, no-calorie sweetener.”
Unless this process can happen in some strange circumstance I would describe that as not natural. I’m not saying it’s bad, poisonous or carcinogenic - probably isn’t. The end result tastes entirely synthetic and overly sweet to me. I drink gallons of aspartame and it may well be worse for you.
Granular sugar is “refined”, bleached maybe, dissolved and condensed, dried packaged and even coloured but at it’s heart the basic chemical formulae is one that occurs naturally. Sucralose doesn’t.
at which point do you set the bar of amount of processing before you decide is not natural, also, from what I was saying, there’s a lot of poisonous plants for example that grow in the jungle as you call it “naturally”, also cooking can be considered a form of processing, let’s consider things like cassava, as it comes in nature is poisonous, but if you cook it it becomes edible and quite delicious too… so as you see, sometimes the human hand makes things better, we just get accustomed to it and marketers like to create this myth of the “natural” things
After reading and researching both sides of the arguments I still believe there is better alternatives for the sweetness than artificial sweetener.
Leaving it in the fridge definitely does help with the sweetness. That aftertaste you get in the back of your throat from the sweetener though…so horrible But at least you do an unsweetened one! Definitely going to add some honey into it!
The vanilla version seems to suit most of us but I’m glad that Huel provides an alternative unsweetened version so that if anyone is averse to sweeteners they can simply add their own flavourings.That should really be the end of any argument.
I prefer food to be fresh and unprocessed as far as possible but this is mainly for flavour and texture. I think it’s important not to be swayed by Naturalistic Fallacy.
“sola dosis facit venenum” - The dose makes the poison. Most of the studies I’ve read showing negative effects of sweeteners have used stupidly large amounts.
Yup. Will be sticking with the unsweetened one. Just thought I’d give my 2 pence as a consumer on how I personally think the vanilla one tastes too fake/sweet, i wonder if sweetener tastes/reacts differently for different people? For me is far to sweet then leaves a bitter aftertaste that lasts for ages, but clearly it doesn’t or isn’t that bad for other people. Strange!
Indeed. According to this article, just 6 litres of water is enough to kill a person:
It’s also worth a look at what the NHS says about Sucralose:
For those who say that the sweetener causes a bitter aftertaste, are you absolutely sure it is the sweetener? Huel also contains pea protein which is known to have a bitter taste.
I’m not usually aware of any bitter aftertaste, though. However, I do much prefer Huel if it’s been left in the fridge overnight. It definitely doesn’t taste as good when its freshly blended.
Definitely the sweetener because I get the same taste when I use the sweetener with tea/coffee. It’s such a prominent flavour (for me) I can pretty much taste sweetener in anything I eat. Unless it’s mint/chewing gum.
Noticed it’s causing me to have slight acid reflux aswel. I’ve read elsewhere on the forums that there is no ingredients that can cause it in the drink so I’m also putting that down to sweetener(someone else has also mentioned this). - It’s all good though. Unsweetened one with honey or sugar is fine for me!
vote for the sweetner here, i think Huel is perfect like it is.
I read somewhere, not sure if it’s true, that some people have genes that allow them to taste sweetner much more and perceive it as a horrid taste. Now i don’t want to encourage quackery on the forum if that is untrue but, this could explain why there is such a polarised divide :).
@donnalouise That’s interesting. It just goes to show how we are all different. I’ve never understood the problem with the taste of the sweetener, but if some people are genuinely experiencing it differently then that’s valid.
@Lurka Well, it’s great that there is the unflavoured version which you can flavour however you like. By the way, I occasionally get a tiny bit of heartburn from Huel, but not enough for it to be a problem.
I have gastric reflux disease and some people say it’s exasserbated by wheat/gluten. So maybe you could try the gluten free version? Also some say that a high carb diet makes it worse.
Really though everyone’s different when it comes to what food causes acid reflux, so actually it could be anything.
whilst drinking my Huel
But at least you do an unsweetened one! Definitely going to add some honey into it!
. Good luck!