Artificial sweeteners are, as a class, extra fattening. They are absolutely counterproductive to anyone trying to reduce weight or indulgence in sweet foods.
The sweeteners are far sweeter than anything in nature, and so they trick the body into going into a sugar-processing mode, but there's no sugar to be had, so the pancreas goes absolutely nuts. Artificial sweeteners are essentially malware that you're putting into your body to hack its processes.
But why do artificial sweeteners exist? Why bother putting them in food in the first place? It seems like we've received some irrational fear of real sugar and made to feel like, we consumed too much of it, so here's this fake replacement so you can consume all the shit you like, but guilt-free.
There's also been an absurd increase in the sweetening of every food, where things like bread just have massive amounts of HFCS and there's been a backlash about that. I think that all this insistence on sweetening everything has just created a market where people don't care how they get their sweet fix, they just want it so desperately that they're willing to consume horrible synthetic toxic waste to get it.
The sweeteners are far sweeter than anything in nature, and so they trick the body into going into a sugar-processing mode, but there's no sugar to be had, so the pancreas goes absolutely nuts. Artificial sweeteners are essentially malware that you're putting into your body to hack its processes.