The debate over which version of a drink is better, diet or regular, has been ongoing since manufacturers began to produce the lower calorie alternative.

The assumption a lot of people make is that if you want the diet version, you must be trying to lose weight. Not that you might actually like drinking it because, of course, nobody could enjoy something not loaded with half a gallon of high fructose corn syrup.

Either way, soda is going to leave you with a mouth like a meth addict and your dentist with a vacation home in Spain, so it shouldn’t matter which one you go for.

I can’t even recall the number of times I’ve gone out somewhere and as soon as I try to order diet coke instead of regular the waiter or waitress has assumed I’m on a diet, completely bypassing the fact that I might just prefer the taste of one over the other. The two actually have completely different recipes and so a difference in opinion as to the taste is quite understandable.

Diet drinks are not just for dieters.

I will admit to being more than a little addicted to Diet Snapple Peach Tea. I used to drink the regular kind until I discovered that you could actually tell there was tea in the diet version.

Pouring a cup of sugar into a can of soda, tea or coffee does not automatically make it taste better. What it does do is make the drink sweeter and masks whatever natural flavors it might have had in the first place.

In some cases this might be preferable, but then again why would you want to consume something that you need to cover up the taste of to even make it palatable enough to choke down?

Sweet things have their place and are quite good in moderation. Chocolate for instance is awesome, though it’s practically inedible in the absence of sugar. But if you always go for the sweetened alternative you end up missing out on a whole other world of flavors.

Everyone has his or her own preferences as to taste and I don’t mean to sound like I believe that adding sugar to something makes it inferior, because I don’t. I do, however, believe that people should broaden their taste bud horizons a little and see where it takes them.

Molly Cahill is a senior pre-journalism major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact

her at [email protected].