>As I said, I had to use 2-3x more than the recommended dose to get the same taste.
Regardless, you would still be safe taking many hundreds of times the reccommended dose as the study shows.
>only eight subjects, and healthy adults.
This is just proof they didn't actually read the article. There were two studies conducted, one involved 8 people and lasted 17 days, and in the second one which lasted 13 weeks:
A total of 118 subjects were recruited, of which
108 completed the study. Of these, 77 received
sucralose (47 males, 30 females) and 31 received
fructose (17 males, 14 females) (Table 1). 10 sub-
jects withdrew from the study, three of these taking
sucralose and seven taking fructose. None of the
withdrawals in the sucralose group was due to
adverse experiences. Withdrawals in the sucralose
group were due to a loss of appetite during wk 2, a
concern about consuming low-calorie sweeteners
and non-compliance with the dosing schedule.
>13 weeks is not "long-term".
Yes it is. Long enough to determine if there are any ill effects. You say you didn't develope kidney stones until several months after you switched from real sugar to artificial sweeteners, but if that was the cause of mineralization, it would have began immediately and early signs would have shown up in tests, particularly if you were consuming significantly more than the reccommended daily dose, every single day, for 3 months, as the participants of this study were. They may not have had actual "stones" within that 3 month period, but mineral crystals would most definitely have been present in their urine.
>what about the effects on children? Or people who aren't that healthy? Usually the ones switching to fake sugar are doing it because they have physical problems
Okay, how about this study which was specifically oriented towards overweight children? http://www.abstracts2view.com/pas/view.php?nu=PAS6L1_895
Overweight children used sucralose as a replacement for sugar for a period of 6 months, and at the end of that period, they had managed to significantly decrease their BMI. The article doesn't mention anything specifically about kidney stones, but I imagine if all of the children in the study (or at least a noticeable portion of them) began developing kidney stones or other health problems, someone would have taken notice.