Using sweeteners instead of sugar is possibly counterproductive though.
A study by scientists in the US suggests that eating artificial sweeteners could make people put on weight because experiments on laboratory rats showed that those eating food sweetened with artificial sweeteners ate more calories than their counterparts whose food was sweetened with normal sugar.
The study is the work of Drs Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson, two psychologists based at the Ingestive Behavior Research Center at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, and is to be published in the February 2008 issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).
The authors suggest that a sweet taste may cause animals to anticipate the calorie content of food, and eating artificial sweeteners with little or no calories undermines this connection, leading to energy imbalance by increasing food intake or reducing energy expenditure.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/96849.php