Artificial sweetners and insulin spikes....

[Jezebel]

Have a look if you are interested in the science behind sweetners and rumours of insulin spikes, a very informative collection of studies
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=9062523

[Arie]

and here is the short of it...

AB - The sweet taste of nonnutritive sweeteners has been reported to increase
hunger and food intake through the mechanism of cephalic-phase insulin
release (CPIR). We investigated the effect of oral sensation of sweetness
on CPIR and other indexes associated with glucose metabolism using
nutritive and nonnutritive sweetened tablets as stimuli. At lunchtime, 12
normal-weight men sucked for 5 min a sucrose, an aspartame-polydextrose,
or an unsweetened polydextrose tablet (3 g) with no added flavor. The
three stimuli were administered in a counterbalanced order, each on a
separate day at 1-wk intervals. Blood was drawn continuously for 45 min
before and 25 min after the beginning of sucking and samples were
collected at 1-min intervals. Spontaneous oscillations in glucose,
insulin, and glucagon concentrations were assessed as were increments
(slopes) of fatty acid concentrations during the baseline period. The
nature of the baseline (oscillations: glucose, insulin, and glucagon; and
slopes: fatty acids) was taken into account in the analyses of
postexposure events. No CPIR and no significant effect on plasma glucagon
or fatty acid concentrations were observed after the three stimuli.
However, there was a significant decrease in plasma glucose and insulin
after all three stimuli. Only the consumption of the sucrose tablet was
followed by a postabsorptive increase in plasma glucose and insulin
concentrations starting 17 and 19 min, respectively, after the beginning
of sucking. In conclusion, this study suggested that oral stimulation
provided by sweet nonflavored tablets is not sufficient for inducing CPIR