For many people, myself very much included, diet soda might be the closest thing to a miracle: a calorie-free and mostly guilt-free way of approximating the tasty joy of a soft drink. As long as diet soda and other sugar-free products have existed, though, some people have cast suspicion toward the non-nutritive sweeteners that make them possible (this category includes artificial sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame, as well as natural options like stevia). Some of these fears are easy enough to dismiss as urban legends, like a popular chain mail in the 2000s falsely claiming that aspartame was originally developed as ant poison. Yet there have been studies in recent years undercutting the assumption that these products are completely harmless.…