Is the New Diet Pepsi Formula Healthier For You?

I'm not a diet pop drinker, so to be honest this news slipped under my radar.

PepsiCo is shipping its new Diet Pepsi beverages to stores this week. What's the difference? Well, the drink will now be sweetened with sucralose instead of aspartame. Sucralose is the chemical used in the sweetener brand Splenda.

But does the change mean the new Diet Pepsi will be better for you? Marketwatch.com says yes:

“Sucralose is almost certainly safer than aspartame,” says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Diet Pepsi will still contain another FDA-approved artificial sweetener — acesulfame-potassium, or ace-K — which some researchers have said needs further testing and research. “The fact that Diet Pepsi will be specifically marketed as ‘aspartame free’ is a blunt acknowledgment that consumers have soured on aspartame and the new cans should increase consumer awareness even further and spur other food and beverage companies to abandon it, including Diet Coke.”

A big question, of course, is whether the drink will taste any different from the "old" Diety Pepsi. Coca-Cola has some experience with a bad formula change, of course. Pepsi also is looking to pump up lagging sales of diet drinks:

Sales of diet soda drinks have dropped by nearly 20% since reaching a peak of $8.5 billion in 2009, according to market research group Euromonitor, and are expected to continue to slide.

Coca-Cola introduced Coke Life in the U.S. last year. It has about half the calories of a regular Coke, and uses both cane sugar and the natural plant sweetener Stevia.