Sugar and its synthetic brothers are addictive. Sugar addiction should be classified as an addiction and given the same sort of attention and funding that alcohol and drug addictions receive.
> Dr. Robert Lustig, an obesity expert and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, said that artificial sweeteners confuse the body: Their sweet flavors send a signal to the brain and the digestive system to brace for a flood of sugar. But when those calories never arrive, it can send hormones like insulin out of whack, over time leading to metabolic dysfunction, he said. > “The short answer is that artificial sweeteners are probably better than sugar, but not by much,” Dr. Lustig said.
NYT: https://archive.ph/MoRg7#selection-887.0-891.114
The difference between smoking and vaping is far more vast than the difference between sugar and artificial sugar
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/artificial-sweeteners-su...
Despite their widespread consumption, I have yet to see any reports of people being directly affected by them, at least in the amounts currently consumed.