While we wait for the inevitable news about how this sweetener is harmful, I can't help but think why we don't have a non-controversial sweetener yet. There are hundreds and hundreds of food additives available in the market which are used everywhere. Many of these are compounds not found naturally and new to the human diet. You would expect any safety concerns arising to be sort of uniformly distributed across different classes of additives, purely from a statistical point of view. And yet sweeteners seem to take the brunt of it. What gives?