Sweetener scrutiny: Are sugar substitutes a helpful tool or an ineffective crutch?

Sweetener scrutiny: Are sugar substitutes a helpful tool or an ineffective crutch?
Artificial sweeteners are considered safe, but questions persist as to what role they play in helping patients lose weight of if, in fact, they cause people to eat more.
By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. April 7, 2008.

The rats in the West Lafayette, Ind., laboratory of Susan Swithers, PhD, don't lose weight when they eat artificially sweetened food. They eat more, and gain more. "Rather than these kind of products making it automatically easier to lose weight, they might make it automatically harder," said Dr. Swithers, a Purdue University associate professor of psychological sciences.
Her study documenting this phenomenon, in the February Behavioral Neuroscience, is the latest flare-up in the decades-long debate regarding the safety of artificial sweeteners and whether they aid weight loss. Cancer fears related to these products may have faded, but the theory they might trigger overeating lives on./.../