The increased diabetes risk is at least somewhat expected from all sweeteners, regardless of origin or caloric load. As an intuition, the fact that you taste s

The increased diabetes risk is at least somewhat expected from all sweeteners, regardless of origin or caloric load. As an intuition, the fact that you taste something as sweet indicates that your brain has received a strong signal, and your hormonal responses are mostly regulated by signals sent from the brain to specialized organs. In practice, the data strongly supports any well-studied sweetener increasing the risk of diabetes and also increasing hunger sufficiently to at least partially mitigate any caloric benefits. The rest of the data I've seen on artificial sweeteners is a dogmatic quagmire with respect to cancers, neural issues, and whatnot, so I wouldn't personally want to draw many conclusions based on it, especially given the conflicts of interest in how most of it was generated. However, on both sides of the debate I think it's worth honestly considering at least those two dangers, especially considering the aggressive marketing of "natural" sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit with a strong implication that being natural means it's safe, and especially with detractors on the other side pointing to a bunch of shitty science over the years as evidence that sugar substitutes are probably safe.