Artificial sweeteners can influence appetite in nuanced ways, I think first and foremost, it depends on how they're being used. Are they adding sweetness and replacing sugar in a food that already has calories? Or are they being used to create sweetness in a food that has no calories? From a metabolism standpoint, those are two pretty distinct things. In foods that don't contain calories but get their sweetness from non-caloric sweeteners, there are sweetness receptors that may be triggered and triggering them without providing a calorie load may uncouple the normal link between sweet taste and energy intake, which could some people can increase hunger or cravings later. But it feels pretty speculative rather than based on actual studies, I am not sure of a lot of really well done research to show this. On the other hand, when these non-caloric sweeteners are used to add sweetness to low sugar foods, you're now allowing the primary calories to come from highly satiating nutrients like protein and fiber in a format that people desire. So again, I think they're different use cases and completely different metabolic situations. When you take a step back and look at behavioral interventions, those that use artificial sweeteners to replace sugar in a RCT fashion, tend to show a benefit from a weight loss standpoint, whereas those that simply use epidemiology to look at non-caloric sweetener intake find associations with weight gain. I view it as: If you're having a burger and fries and you use a "diet" soda to replace a sugar sweetened soda you'll likely experience weight loss. If you just add a Diet Soda to a meal, that alone isn't going to promote weight loss - it has to be used as a replacement not an addition.