I've always been rather sceptical about artificial sweeteners.
There have been the rumbling concerns about safety since the 80s - mostly refuted scientifically, but there's always that nagging suspicion about who's doing the studies.
More importantly, you have to ask, is it really good to "fool" your body into thinking it's eating something rich in calories, when it isn't?

Well, this week two studies came out to fan my scepticism...

A team at Purdue University (Indiana) found that rats fed yoghurts sweetened with saccharine gained more weight than those given yoghurt sweetened with glucose. The experimenters reckon that, by breaking the connection between a sweet sensation and a high-calorie food, artificial sweeteners harm the body's ability to regulate its calorie intake.

And meanwhile, over at the University of Minnesota, scientists have been following 9,500 men and women for nine years, and found that "surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome" [obesity, high cholestorol, high blood pressure, diabetes risk] "was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared to those who drank none". In fact, results for Diet soda drinkers were even worse than the bad "Western" diet of lots of refined grains, fried foods and red meats.

So there's a certain irony that drinks like "Diet" Coke could actually be having the opposite effect, and making people put on weight and raising their diabetes risks - just like their sugary predecessors.
Certainly, most of the people I know who have really struggled with their weight are also those who drink the most diet drinks.
With the Minnesota study, there's the chicken/egg question of course - people who struggle with their weight are likely to drink more diet drinks. But the rat study is more compelling - after all, it's not as though the rats knew they were "diet" yoghurts...

Eating and obesity are a minefield, because humans weren't designed to have abundant food available, and we certainly weren't designed to drink lots of sweet liquids. I have no doubt that the world would be a much healthier place if everyone stopped drinking fizzy drinks tomorrow - the correlations between soft-drink consumption per capita and obesity and diabetes rates are so compelling that only a scientific establishment terrified of the sugar and soft drinks industry's power could fail to admit it.

Perhaps one day people will look back at the soft drinks sponsoring "healthy" events like the Olympics with the same irony/ horror that we now look back at those old ads about doctors preferring Camel cigarettes...

P.S. One final prediction. Based on past form, you can expect the sugar/ sweetener industry (it's mostly the same companies) to discredit all the above studies, and their authors, within days. In fact, they're so ruthless in their "quest for truth" about sugar, that few people dare to investigate e.g., the link between sugar and obesity, for fear of having their funding cut and their entire past work trawled for the slightest error. Brave scientists like Lyn Steffen and Susan Swithers are few and far between.
For more on how the Sugar industry works, read this BBC article or track down the brilliant Panorama from a few years back on "The Trouble with sugar".

Sorry for the conspiracist rant - but an industry that could be contributing to millions of diabetes victims, but stifles research about it, deserves more ranters.