WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

No no no. A human doesnt automatically become science, you must always cite.

For one thing you assumed my childhood was spent in the UK. More importantly, though, you assumed that when I called those drinks "childhood tastes" it meant they were the tastes of my childhood. Far from it. Food is the most important thing in my life after family, and that goes back generations.

Your experiences of food in the UK don't match mine, and I've travelled plenty. In most places in the world you'll find some specialities done well, but I've yet to find anywhere with a greater range and depth of culinary options than London (although any truly global city will compete).

I rarely eat supermarket bread as we make our own daily. We mostly use Marriage's flour, which is available in many places, including Waitrose. That said, the bog standard Chorleywood stuff is comparable to equivalent products in Europe and decent farmhouse loaves, San Francisco style sourdough, baguettes, ciabatta, pain de campagne, etc. are all widely available in supermarkets. I can obtain more specialised baked goods from any of at least 4 good bakeries a short walk from my house.

As for cheese, France, Italy and Switzerland do have some wonderful ones, and I can obtain many of them any time I want from the cheesemonger down the road. As often as not, though, I'll buy something UK made. Baron Bigod is better than any Brie de Meaux I've tried and while Roquefort is briefly entertaining in a salty sort of way it can't compete with Colston Bassett Stilton. I don't recall seeing much of any of them in Mediterranean countries.

I can't speak for coffee as I don't drink the stuff. I'm pretty sure I could obtain just about any kind of coffee in the world with ease here, though, if I wanted to.

The tyranny of "healthy" food is the exclusion of experiences for no good reason. There's nothing wrong with sugar, fat or salt, you just need to avoid eating too much of them (or too little in the case of fat and salt). By far the most effective tool for that is good old-fashioned calorie counting, and thank god that alongside the various ill-judged public health measures in the UK there's also now the requirement for most food sellers to provide calorie info.

FWIW my dinner last night was homemade olive and garlic sourdough, which I had with some Ubriaco Rosso and some Godminster Cheddar. Delicious and life-affirming. 820kcal.

I don't know where your obsession with turnips has come from. I think I've only ever had them as part of Cornish pasties, which rule. I'm more of a swede man myself - give me haggis, neeps and tatties any time.

False. I provided you the evidence. Here's more, keep lying if it makes you feel better.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ "In several in vitro experiments, it has been found that nicotine in concentrations as low as 1 μM decreased the anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic effects exerted by chemotherapeutics on several different malignant cell lines"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/ "There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer."

Are you a big vaper or something and this is upsetting to you or something? I can't see any other reason for you to react with outright lies.

Your previous comment didn't include any evidence, but these are pretty interesting. The second one is more damning, but again the majority of studies were on smokers. I'll update my statement and say there is little evidence that nicotine by itself is carcinogenic. As the second article says "The IARC monograph has not included nicotine as a carcinogen." so it's still not conclusive. The strongest thing I see in the second article is that nicotine can help promote existing tumors, that's concerning.

But the way science works is by having lots of viewpoints and research - there are also plenty of papers on how nicotine is not carcinogenic.

"Smokers commonly misperceive that nicotine is a major carcinogen" - https://thorax.bmj.com/content/66/4/353#ref-2

"The literature to February 2019 suggests that there is no increased cardiovascular risk of nicotine exposure in consumers who have no underlying cardiovascular pathology. There is scientific consensus that nicotine is not a direct or complete carcinogen, however, it remains to be established whether it plays some role in human cancer propagation and metastasis. " - https://f1000research.com/articles/8-1586 (This is what I saw in the second article - looks like there is a chance that nicotine can promote existing cancer)

"The devastating link between tobacco products and human cancers results from a powerful alliance of two factors — nicotine and carcinogens. Without either one of these, tobacco would be just another commodity, instead of being the single greatest cause of death due to preventable cancer. Nicotine is addictive and toxic, but it is not carcinogenic. This addiction, however, causes people to use tobacco products continually, and these products contain many carcinogens." - https://www.nature.com/articles/nrc1190

I am not a vaper, I do use patches and gum. I believe that damning nicotine prevents the development of replacements for smoking which is incredibly dangerous. I don't vape because research on that is in really early stages, and there's a good chance there might be something bad in the long term, though there is no strong evidence that it is worst than other NRT, except that levels of NNAL are higher (see the first paper you posted).

Edit To clarify that you didn't provide evidence in your first post - you linked to https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-nicotine-5075412 which has citations, but the comments about nicotine being carcinogenic linked to studies that studied smoking, not NRT or non-smoke based nicotine.

Well that is very unreasonable. First you say that Ribena et al. are "childhood tastes". Then when I say that's sad, you say "not my childhood!" and accuse me of making assumptions. Well, by that token, you're making assumptions too: I never said I think your childhood was spent in the UK.

There is an XKCD for that style of communication, you know:

https://xkcd.com/169/

About the cheese, you should check out any supermarket in France, Italy or Greece. In Italy or Greece, chances are you'll find 30 different kinds, including a couple of locally-made ones. In France it's more like 130. In the small Auchan at the corner of Tolbiac and Rue Barrault, near where I stayed in Paris, there were six or seven refrigerators dedicated exclusively to cheese- cheese of every type (bloomy rinds, washed rinds, pressed, cooked, hard, soft, blue, white, ... ), and from every corner of France (little goat's cheeses from the Valee de la Loire, Corsican sheep's milk cheese, tommes from all over the place...). The larger Carrefour in the Italie Deux mall, at the center of the 13th arrondissement had about a dozen. My friendly neighbourhood cheesemonger stocked an even greater variety and at a much better quality. I swear I have never seen so much cheese, of so many different kinds and from so many different places all together in one place. Of course, he was "Meilleur Ouvrier de France". Try to imagine the British DWP handing out medals to the best cheesemongers, or bakers!

Stilton? Well that's a good cheese, no disagreeing. But then, you go to a Sainsbury's, or a Tesco's, and what authentically British cheeses do they stock? If they stock Stilton, that's lucky. Then it's cheddar, cheddar, cheddar... oh, and even more cheddar. Maybe a bit of Wensleydale, and that only thanks to Aardman. And you know why? Because the average Brit only knows three kinds of cheese: haloumi, mozzarella and cheddar. Did I mention cheddar?

Sorry, but the variety and quality of cheese in the continent is just not something that the UK can compare with, and the Europeans know what they are and how to appreciate them.

P.S. Olive and garlic sourdough... why? Why put things in bread? Unless you're making pizza that is. See, I don't know if you're British but that's just such a British thing to do. The British have no understanding of why bread is good, because it sucks when they make it, so they stuff it with... stuff. Because they think that makes it somehow magickally better. It doesn't! It just makes it bad bread with stuff in it.