The WHO recently published a recommendation essentially condemning all non-sugar sweeteners. I've read through much of the 200 page report (https://www.who.int/

The WHO recently published a recommendation essentially condemning all non-sugar sweeteners. I've read through much of the 200 page report (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429 https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429), and what I found was really troubling: time and time again, the report takes a longitudinal study whose authors note "likely confounding", omits that information, and then includes the study's conclusions stripped of that context. In one case I saw, the WHO report implied that the authors had adequately controlled for confounding factors even though the authors had specifically called them out as a weakness. Even more puzzling, the WHO announcement (https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-use-non-sugar-sweeteners-for-weight-control-in-newly-released-guideline https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...) explicitly lists essentially every commonly known artificial sweetener, even though the evidence the report cites is extremely uneven and has very little to say about many of them. The studies on long term health effects, in particular, are almost entirely based on studies which examine soft drink consumption. Aside from the obvious, difficult-to-control biases is that approach (e.g. people who drink diet drinks are disproportionately people who are trying to lose weight, are diabetic, have been told to switch by their doctor, etc.), this means that virtually all of the data is primarily about aspartame, since that's the primary sweetener in most diet drinks. The cherry on top is that the WHO announcement suggests that people try to shift to "naturally occurring sugars" despite the fact that multiple studies cited by the report specifically note that the health impact of fruit juice consumption is not distinguishable from any other sugar consumption. That said, from my non-expert point of view, the one thing that does seem to be pretty consistent is evidence on gut biome effects. It kind of seems like there's some mechanism involving sweetness itself and gut biome interference, and I'm not sure what's going on there. But the WHO report is disturbing. A meta-analysis is supposed to pull together large numbers of studies in order to smooth out biases and find broader trends, but what this report seems to have done instead is to launder biases that were reported with integrity. Taken together with the WHO recommendation, a large number of sporadic and often suspicious results have been put together into a wildly sweeping conclusion which does not look to me like it's at all scientifically justified.