I find that the claim that they lead to weight gain is absolutely absurd and that makes me serioisly doubt the validity of these studies. It has already been shown that many of the anti fat studies were funded by the sugar industry. It is now coming out that those studies were fraudulent. So when there is evidence, like the absurdity of the claims, that this is a repeat of history I'm going to lean towards that conclusion. Artificial sweeteners can't be metabolized and therfore can't lead to weight gain. Furthurmore, the links I looked at all make zero distinction between different sweeteners. That is a huge red flag. That is already very sloppy work, then they go on to suggest that the sweeteners are the cause of diabetes when, according to other doctors "[type 2 diabetes is a multifactorial disease with many different types of causes](https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/diet/can-eating-too-much-sugar-cause-diabetes/) It is obvious to anyone with a brain that the study is massively flawed because it has a huge bias in grouping unhealthy individuals into the study group. They literally mention that huge flaw and then claim to mitigate it by simply controlling for BMI. But BMI is not the only factor in developing diebetes, yet drinking diet soda biases that group to a lot of factors, for example those people likely exercise less than the fat people who choose to lose weight other ways. This is junk science.