Sweet News For Dieters

The truth about artificial sweeteners may not be as bitter as reports suggest.

- Emily Delzell

If you’ve been using artificial sweeteners to try to lose weight, reports connecting them to weight gain might have you wondering whether they’re helping or hurting.

Headline-grabbing studies of artificial sweeteners – including three of the most popular, aspartame (Equal, NutraSweet), sucralose (Splenda) and saccharin (Sweet’N Low, Sugar Twin) – report links between the sweeteners’ use and weight gain, not loss. For instance, one study of nearly 3,700 people found that normal-weight people who drank diet beverages for seven or eight years had an almost doubled risk of becoming overweight or obese compared to nondiet drinkers.

But experts say these sweeteners can help with weight loss, and some evidence backs them up.

The Research Problem