Artificial sweeteners, specifically, are a bandage over the festering wound of a culture of mindless consumption. Companies want you to consume more so you buy more, but as soon as people began to worry about the rather expected obesity resulting from gorging and constant snacking on food and drink, and mediocre food and drink at that, the only alternative in the unhinged profit-above-all-else logic of consumerism is to maintain or increase consumption exceeding actual need, but reduce the apparent consequences of mindless consumption.
The common good requires a conservative legal oversight in this space where weird food additives are concerned, but it also includes abstract truths like "gluttony is evil" or "making financial profit the highest end is disordered". Our cultural and civilizational demise is rooted in things like the latter, and the intellectual and spiritual rot and resulting debasement of common sensibilities regarding such intangibles. Which is to say, regulation by itself, without appropriate cultural shifts, will, at best, function as another bandage that corporations will lobby to dilute and weaken and redefine at every opportunity.
And yet all those chemicals are allowed in Europe.
So what happened? Were they grandfathered in?