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The following appeared in the health section of a magazine on trends and lifestyles:

"People who use the artificial sweetener aspartame are better off consuming sugar, since aspartame can actually contribute to weight gain rather than weight loss. For example, high levels of aspartame have been shown to trigger a
craving for food by depleting the brain of a chemical that registers satiety, or the sense of being full. Furthermore, studies suggest that sugars, if consumed after at least 45 minutes of continuous exercise, actually enhance the body's ability to burn fat. Consequently, those who drink aspartame-sweetened juices after exercise will also lose this calorie-burning benefit. Thus it appears that people consuming aspartame rather than sugar are unlikely to achieve their dietary goals."

Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc.

My essay:

The argument aims to prove that people using aspartame instead of sugar are unlikely to achieve their dietary goals. In order to reach that conclusion, the article uses flawed arguments and from those, draws a far-reaching conclusion.

First, the arguments assumes that everyone on an aspartame diet have the goal of losing weight, but this is ultimately false. People with diabetes, for instance, have a strict dietary restriction regarding sugar, and some of them use aspartame to substitute it. Even if they don’t lose weight, they can achieve their dietary goals, which is to avoid sugar intake. In addition, even if by dietary goals the article means losing weight, it fails to mention all the other factors that affects weight loss. Those include, for example, exercise, and overall dietary habits (other than just sugar vs. aspartame).

Second, the argument states that high levels of aspartame have been shown to trigger a craving for food, but fails to include information about where this study came from. Without knowing the origin of such conclusion, it is hard for a reader to believe in this statement, and thus, in the way it is used right now, it only weakens the overall reasoning of the argument.

Third, the argument states that consuming sugar helps with burning fat after exercise, but this does not help the reasoning of the argument. Sugar has calories, and by failing to provide this argument with data, a reader cannot know if, in fact, the increased burning of fat wouldn’t actually be offset by the higher intake of sugar calories.

Concluding, the argument fails to prove its point by making several flawed statements and using those to reach a conclusion. To make the argument sounder, the writer could focus on one dietary goal: weight loss, for instance, and then fix the argument it uses by providing additional data.