What is "artificial?"

It is all marketing BS

That's precisely why I use it in my coffee and have for many years. However there's a big difference from one brand to another I've found. Sweet Leaf stevia drops are the only kind I'll use now.

Might not be artificial, but it doesn't look natural in sweetener form:

The process of extracting stevia -

Dried stevia leaves are subjected to purified water first. Then followed by a precipitation process with ferric chloride and calcium hydroxide to remove non-soluble plant materials & other impurities and follow filtration.

Then the leaf extract goes through an adsorption resin, which is used to trap the steviol glycosides of the leaf extract.

Afterward, wash the resin with ethanol to release steviol glycosides and decolorize the resulting solution with activated carbon to remove the colors in leaves, and then concentrated by evaporation.

Again, go through the process of decolorization, filtration and spray-drying. The spray-dried product is then combined with similarly processed additional extracts, dissolved in ethanol and/or methanol, crystallized and filtered. Finally, after further processes of crystallization, filtered and spray-dried to obtain pure stevioside.

Taken from here: https://foodadditives.net/natural-sweeteners/stevioside/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-1949

But it tastes artificial and fucks with lots of tummies.

Not only that, but unless you can guarantee that a significant portion users will recycle those aluminum cans, they are significantly more energy intensive to manufacture compared to single use plastic bottles.

Stevie leaf extract is a petroleum base sweetener. It was used as an artificial sweetener , but then they found that it could be naturally occurring in small quantities and rebranded. It works like natural flavors where it can still come from petroleum so long as its naturally occurring with some source. I find it extremely bitter and soapy, just like almost every other artificial sweetener.

That's the trouble with words like 'artificial' and 'natural'. They mean nothing. It would be better to call them refined additives, because I expect the "stevia" would be in a refined, extracted form when added - whether substantially changed from the form present in the plant or not, this could be considered artificial, if we insist on using this word.

I presume you're not from the US.

Many municipalities across the US have poor quality or non drinkable water, and many more do not offer public access to water fountains. Thus, bottled water is a huge market in the US as free facilities are not always available.

I'm Canadian and I legitimately cannot recall the last time I bought bottled or canned water. I bring my two 18.9L jugs to the store to fill them with filtered water for $5 and that's the extent of my "bottled water" consumption. Elsewhere, I carry a metal water bottle I can get refilled anywhere for free.

Cans are actually recyclable. That's the benefit. The rest is marketing.

Red Bull doesn't give you wings either.

The reason venues live the cans is that that can't be recapped after opening, so they are harder to refill so you keep buying more instead of reupping in the bathroom.

Yeah the slogan goes "Don't be scared. It's just water." So same here, I thought it was just water lol.

It's a US label and the percents are % of recommended daily intake. So that's 3% of your daily recommended carbohydrate intake, 6% of your daily recommended intake of sugar, and 12% of your daily recommended intake of "added" sugar. The recommendation is something like, no more than half of your carbs should come from sugar, and no more than half of those should be added during manufacturing (i.e. most of your sugar intake should be from fresh fruit, etc.). So the numbers do line up.