This is The Guardian.

It's that time of year when lots of us will be indulging in puddings, sweets, chocolates, biscuits, fizzy drinks, you name it.

Yet when all the festivities are done and we're trying to be healthy again,

it can be hard to fight those cravings for something sugary.

Step in artificial sweeteners, a hit of sweetness but without the calories,

which led to a question that Science Weekly listener Marion had for us.

If sugar is so bad, why aren't we replacing it with sweeteners more widely?

Are they the cure-all we've been looking for? And are they good for us in the long run?

So today, sugar versus sweeteners, which is better or worse for our health?

And should we be picking one over the other?

I'm the Guardian Science Editor Ian Sampel, and this is Science Weekly.

Madeline, we're chatting today about a question that came in from listener Marion.

Marion wanted to know about the risks of sweeteners. And if they're

better than sugars, why are they not in lots more products? So you're going to dive into this

debate, sugars versus sweeteners. First in the ring, sugar. So remind us what we're talking

about here. Sugar, generally speaking, are in all kinds of plants, in fruits and vegetables, anything

that contains carbohydrates really. So dairy products like milk contain sugars. But we're

not really thinking about these naturally occurring sugars in fruit and vegetables. We're

thinking about added sugars. So

free sugars. That's the honey that you squeeze on your porridge in the morning. It's the stuff

you might find in a box of cereal or in fizzy drinks. And most of our added sugars come from a

few places. So there's sugarcane and that is a temperate tropical grass plant. It's largely grown in Brazil and India. There's sugar beet that can be grown in colder weather places like Russia and France. And then there's also corn syrup and one that some people might have heard of high fructose corn syrup,

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