This week our panelists sipped cups of hot tea containing brands of artificial sweeteners to see if they could discern any differences in taste. In the Feb. 1 Taste section, we reported our tasters' opinions on seven other imitation sugar packets, with the options from Winn-Dixie and Walmart and the Splenda brand coming out on top. They sampled seven more this week, in the tea and also by dipping their fingers in the plain powders. As in the previous tasting, the Walmart store brand did well. Each packet sampled was supposed to taste like the equivalent of 2 teaspoons of sugar. The imitation sweeteners were primarily made with aspartame, saccharin, sucralose or stevia leaf extract. Two of this week's picks were a sugar alcohol called erythritol.

Kathy Saunders, Times correspondent

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