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I partially agree with you. But the selling point of artificial sweeteners was that they were a healthier substitute.

It's better to teach people that there is no free lunch, and they should take care about the calories they are consuming, even if that imply reduce frequency of sweet foods, than sugar coating an equally bad alternative to make it sound like it's healthier.

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1. Artificial sweeteners are healthier substitutes. Aspartame is truly a free lunch. It's not carcinogenic, it's zero-calories for real, it doesn't cause X Y Z. It's perfectly safe.

2. "no free lunch" is a phrase we need to retire forever. Yes, there is free lunch, we do it all the time. That's why infant mortality was 50% and now it's 1 in 1000. That's just called progress, we make things better all the time. That's kind of what humans do.

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