What makes diet cola diet?

Diet cola is actually not a modified form of the original cola recipe but is produced from an entirely different recipe. Original cola contains the sugar sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup depending on the country of origin, which both have a high calorific value. Diet cola, on the other hand, contains a blend of sweeteners – including aspartame and sucralose – which is 200 and 600 times sweeter that regular sugar respectively. This means that much smaller quantities of sweeteners can be used to achieve the same level of sugariness without adding lots of calories compared to just 1.3 calories found in a can of diet cola.