What's wrong with diet soda?
Also, I think there might actually be some links to type II diabetes, but I'm skeptical of causation on that one. It's not implausible, but fully correcting for people already trying to reduce sugar intake sounds essentially impossible in that case.
A search on Google Scholar shows multiple publications exploring the adverse effects on sweeteners on gut microbiome:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=artificial+sweeteners+e...
I think this should be normalized. In a lot of threads like this, there's some teetotalers that say all vices are bad and you should stop all of them at once.
But vices are fine, in moderation. Having some soda every once in a while is fine. Drinking it by the gallon every day is problematic. But it's been normalized like that by the companies that produce them.
Back in my day (shush kids, grandpa is talking), we got one, maybe two small glasses of soda and some crisps on a sunday. That was it.
Or are you talking about other ingredients?
Even the studies of them being bad for "getting used to sweetness" and thus making people more obese through compensatory over-eating are studies that rely on self-reporting and polling.
When properly controlled, physics works as it always has and you can't magic mass or energy out of thin air.