"Consensus" is how effeminate minds seek the comfort of socially safe beliefs to hold and profess. This is not how science works. The whole point of science is to get away from that. Reality is the way it is. It can be no other way. Science is a collection of attempts to describe and predict that reality. Each of those attempts is either right, or it is wrong. How many ape brains agree or disagree with any such attempt is entirely irrelevant to how true it is. If you wish to know which of them are correct, then you must look at the results they produce. Not at how they make you or others feel. Eating sugar and starch (read: potatoes, noodles, rice, bread, cereal, etc) makes you fat. Because it teaches your body to turn sugar into fat. Eating fat keeps you slim. Because it teaches your body to burn fat for energy. Popular opinion be damned. How much of the typical modern diet consists of sugar and starch? How much is promoted for being fat-free. or specially processed to be low-fat? What results has this produced? Artificial sweeteners don't really have an effect on this one way or the other. The whole point of them is that they are not (or barely) metabolized. In other words: They come out the same way they went in. Which means they're not really food at all. They're not part of a diet. They're completely outside of it. Just entertainment for the taste buds. This means they will not help your hunger, and will likely make you crave things with real sugar or starch, unless you replace those with better energy sources (fat and protein). Also many of them are toxic and dangerous. If you must have something sweet, and want to avoid sugar, your best bet is Erythritol or Xylitol. These are sugar alcohols and not technically artificial, being found naturally in small quantities in many fruits and vegetables. They won't do you any harm. But they also won't do you any good. They just taste like sugar without being sugar.