The price of ‘sugar free’: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?
These articles are always divisive and lacking in substance. The science is usually exceedingly poor: I&#x27;ve only seen one posted to HN that actually looked at alternative sweeteners individually rather than assuming, say, xylitol and stevia do identical things to your body. And with it comes a strong prescription to change dietary habits yet again.<p>Honestly, because these are thought pieces, because they seek to influence behavior, and because of the long history of the sugar lobby doing pernicious things to influence the public (<i>even to the point of starting wars</i>), I don&#x27;t think they should be on HN unless the link is to a peer reviewed, reproducible, high-quality study.<p>BL: Without a large-N variable-isolated longitudinal study that distinguishes between different sweeteners, articles like the OP are indistinguishable from sugar-lobby FUD.