There's no evidence that aspartame does 95% of the shit that's attributed to it. "YoU mIgHt As WeLl JuSt DrInK rEgUlaR," say busybodies peering their noses down at my Diet Coke while on their sixth beer of the evening. "It's sweet, so your stomach thinks it's sugar, and your body treats it like sugar!" someone told me once, but as far as I'm aware, there's no mechanism for glycolysis to happen on aspartame molecules.

That being said, I quit Diet Coke to see if it would help me lose weight. There are no long-term human studies showing this (because nobody has done them), but there are mouse studies showing that aspartame encourages the proliferation of insulin-resistant gut bacteria. It hasn't helped at all, but I'm going to stay off the DC another three months. If there's still no change, I'll go back to it, because it tastes delicious.

I was mostly in larger cities, but I could get Coke Zero in Mexico and Peru, or "Coca Cola sin Azucar." Nobody had Diet Coke, except one Subway in the Mexico City airport.