Do artificial sweeteners have any bad side effects?
Yes.
Read it all here, this article goes over the weakensses of the sweeterners.
http://www.westonaprice.org/modernfood/sugarfree_blues.html
Artificial sweeteners have no bad side effects, except for a very small minority of people who have a specific genetic disease (see last site below).
I searched for the most authoritative and unbiased sites (American Heart Association, American Chemical Society, Food and Drug Administration, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin) and all agree that artificial sweeteners are harmless to almost everyone.
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4447
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff/8225sweeteners.html
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2006/406_sweeteners.html
http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/040629.Swithers.research.html
(Broken Link Removed)
Whether artifical sweetners are safe or not has been the subject of hot debates for many years. The debate continues today. Pros for avoiding the sweetners have tons and tons of evidence, much of it anecdotal; likewise, advocates of artificial sweetners have similar evidence. The Internet is filled with a lot of good information (both pro and con) but much (most?) of it is trash. Anyone can post on the Internet and say whatever they wish. Your job, as a consumer, is to read (slog) through this material and come to an opinion. As you do this keep in mind that you want to see hard evidence from studies that support one view or the other. Many of the articles are written by reporters who have little or no technical training and their articles are little more than a facade of words. Most reporters try to write without taking sides but most reports they write (I think) are biased one way or the other. And of course some reports are sensationalized in order to sell. I suppose it would take a book, and one may have been written by now, to adequately discuss the pro reports and the con reports, and come to a scientific opinion. I think that is what the FDA is supposed to do. Also, I think the FDA does the best job it can, under the circumstances, but it is a federal agency and politics creeps in there ,too, as it does in most federal agencies. But that is another debate. I have tried to write this as neutrally as possible, neither advocating nor opposing the use of artificial sweetners. I hope I have succeeded.