Stevia Health And Sugar Substitute

by admin on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | 9 Comments

There has been a lot of confusion about using Stevia. Stevia health and as a sugar substitute, a natural sweetener. I personally have heard for many years a lot about Stevia, and needed to clear up my own misunderstandings on using Stevia as a sugar substitute.

I am probably going to stick with organic sugar or honey for my sweeteners, but Stevia does offer a healthy alternative for a sugar substitute, especially for those who enjoy the highly concentrated sweeteners like, sucralose, and aspartame, etc.

This was a great video I found about Stevia and its health worthiness, and a little of its history, and present and future use.

(”Mr. Blumenthal has over 25 years experience with herbs, medicinal plants and natural products. He has appeared on over 400 radio or television shows, written over 500 articles for publication, as well as chapters for natural alternative medicine encyclopedias, and was an advisor for the World Health Organization (WHO) in its adaptation of the “Guidelines for the Assessment of Herbal Medicines.”)

Stevia is a very important sweetening herb since unnatural sweeteners are chemically derived and are not healthy for us.

Stevia is a plant, ingenous to South America, in the areas of Paraguay and parts of Brazil. The plant is used by the Guarani Indians as a sweetening agent. The have a local name which means “sweet leaf”. It is not known how many hundreds or thousands of years they have been using it.

The latin name is “Stevia rebaudiana bertoni”.

The plant’s interest today, and for the last 30-40 years, is that it has a very high sweetening capacity. The Stevia leaf is around 50 times sweeter than sugar, maybe more. The compounds in Stevia can be 300x – 400x sweeter than sucrose, table sugar. So the individual compounds in the leaf that give it its sweet flavor are highly concentrated with no caloric value whatsoever.

So the nice thing about Stevia, is that you can flavor you coffee, tea, or other drinks, and you can cook with it without adding calories.

Now in today’s society where obesity is considered by public health officials at epidemic levels, and the problems associated with obesity like diabetes,metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and others, we need to find ways to sweeten and flavor foods and at the same time, reduce caloric intake.

Especially with the children. Consider all the high-calorie drinks they are consuming.

Many folks are concerned about the safety of alternative sweeteners that are synthetic chemically formed, and which have been known to cause side effects.

Stevia has been repeatedly shown by its data to be safe. In June, 2008, the Joint Expert Committee for Food Additives (JECFA) , which is a special expert committee of the World Health Organization and the United Nations, after a 3 year review of all the chemistry, toxicology, pharmacology and clinical trials done on Stevia have concluded that Stevia, especially the extracts that are standardized at a certain level of these particular glycocides in Stevia, the sweetening agents, are safe for human consumption at a rate of 4mg per kg of body weight (pg54 of the document).

So they are saying that this Stevia is safe to use as a food sweetener and food additive. Based on that, Australia has already approved Stevia as a food additive in Australia. Stevia has been used extensively for around 30 years in Japan.

Other European nations were waiting for the UN/WHO study described above before adopting its use.

They were interested in the safety of the food additive before adopting its use. Because as a food additive, they don’t want people throwing things into their food that might cause cancer or heart disease over the long term.

Safety is a big regulatory issue both abroad and in the US by the FDA.

Stevia was being used in the early 1990’s in some herbal teas until the FDA came in and put a stop to it. The said, it’s an unsafe product, because we don’t know about its safety. With food additives, you are guilty until proven innocent. That is a good policy for the FDA to have, because having all sorts of chemicals which have never been tested and never before consumed by humans and having them be incorporated into our food supply could prove hazardous. Therefore a bit of diligence has been applied by the FDA to determine the toxicity if any and the safety of the product before. So the FDA put a restriction on bringing Stevia into the United States as of May of 1991.

In October of 1994, Congress passed the “Dietary Supplements Health And Education Act”, (DSHEA). One of the key provisions of this act in that dietary supplements as not food additives. They are not food additives, so they do not have to be pre-approved for safety before they are sold as a dietary supplement.

Since 1995, Stevia has been sold in the United States under supplement labeling.

In the US, one company called Wisdom Natural Brands, owned by a gentleman named Jim May, ironically first introduced Stevia in the United States in 1982. This company has hired experts to evaluate the safety of Stevia through what is known as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) affirmation. They have confirmed the safety of Stevia. The GRAS affirmation was reviewed by Life Science Research Office, an independent, non profit , science group, and they’ve approved of it.

On a more high profile level: Coca Cola and Cargill Inc.
() have done a joint venture and they have their own Stevia on the market, called rebiana .

They have done clinical and animal studies on this and have found it to be safe and they have self approved this. They have notified the FDA and to the date of the video (2008) the FDA has not written a letter of objection or acceptance.

What’s happening now, is that Cargill is marketing their Truvia in stores in sachets where you pour it out like a packet of sugar. They have done their diligence and recognize this as safe.

Pepsi Cola has a deal going on with Merisant , the company that makes aspartame. They have introduced its all-natural, zero-calorie sweetener under the brand name of PureVia.

The good news is that some major agricultural, food based companies in the United States, multi billion dollar companies are putting money into Stevia. They are putting money into science confirming the safety of Stevia. The end result will be that the consumer will, presumably within the next few months or years, begin to have access to products sweetened with Stevia. Stevia, again, is a high sweetened, no calorie, and this can have nothing but a good effect on public health from a caloric, obesity perspective.

Stevia will be replacing the high fructose corn syrup.

Stevia’s conversion to sugar can be found at this site:

Sugar amount	Equivalent Stevia powdered extract	Equivalent Stevia liquid concentrate
1 cup	1 teaspoon	1 teaspoon
1 tablespoon	1/4 teaspoon	6 to 9 drops
1 teaspoon	A pinch to 1/16 teaspoon	2 to 4 drops

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Erik Loebl

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