RIP, Bill Sharfman

Bill Sharfman, circa 2017

I haven’t had a diet Coke in three years, and Bill Sharfman gets a large part of the credit.

I had chugged the stuff — or its predecessor, Tab — since my parents had put it on the dinner table in 1982. There is even a picture of me, in a special issue of US News and World Report from 1996, striding down the halls of Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital before 6 a.m. as a medical student on my surgical rotation with a 20-ounce bottle in my hand. 

Sometime in the mid-2010s, however, I became convinced by studies suggesting that artificial sweeteners were doing me more harm than good. So like leading cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, I quit. My wife Cate was delighted, and set to work finding all sorts of ways to make iced coffee: My other problem was that I had never developed a taste for hot drinks. 

But all of those methods seemed too complicated for someone used to unscrewing a cap and pouring. How would I wake up my brain every morning?