Diet Coke is a carbonated vegetable extract drink, sweetened with aspartame.

Whether it be used as part of a calorie-controlled diet, or ingested 'just for the taste of it' or merely used to strip some particularly stubborn paint from your front door, Diet Coke has become a household name.

According to the adverts, office professionals and housewives alike, down tools mid-morning for the so-called 'Diet Coke break' to stare at a bare-chested, usually blond gentlemen with sweat problems. apparently the Diet Coke break is now as much a part of human ritual as getting drunk at the office party and the eternal wish that income tax will, one day, actually be abolished.

Now with more a good reputation than its older, more tasteful sibling, Diet Coke is the drink of a generation. Or, more often, the drink of a lunchtime.