Stevia Products - Not All Equal

With all the hype about substitute sweeteners these days, it's hard to know which ones to use. One of these substitutes that is becoming more popular is Stevia.

This product is marketed as a zero calorie natural sweetener for those with diabetes or anyone just looking to cut down on their sugar intake. Supposedly, your body doesn't recognize it as sugar and it even suppresses your sugar cravings. With a glycemic index of zero and 200-300x more sweet than regular sugar, why not use this as your new regular sugar substitute, right? Not necessarily. First, I don't recommend adding sugar into your diet as a regular occurrence, be it dried fruit or a product marketed as "natural." This word doesn't mean anything and is just another green-washing, marketing strategy to pull one over on you. However, there are special occasions when you may want to indulge a little. During these times, I recommend rotating sweeteners so you don't over do any of them as we are still learning about some of the long term effects and all facts are not always presented truthfully to us from the start from the manufacturers or studies. If you do decide to use the Stevia plant sweetener, please know that not all Stevia products are created equally.

Green Leaf (Stevia) - Stevia is a plant and it's green. This is the kind to buy if you want to use a Stevia sweetener. You can buy the unprocessed leaf already ground down for you into powder. Like coffee, there are different grades of this plant. The most popular and widely sold grade is the lowest grade which also leaves that bitter after taste you might be familiar with. It's not that hard to grow your own Stevia plant, either. Then you can dry it, grind it in a coffee grinder and also make your own liquid concentrate that you know came from the real thing.

White Powder Extract (Stevioside) - The white powdered stuff that is marketed as stevia is not really stevia. It is just another refined white sugar, many times almost devoid of the original leaf. Many so-called stevia products are processed using ethanol, methanol, solvents, alcohols, or a combination which may result in a strange taste and then they use maltodextrin, erythritol, dextrose, silica or a combination of these to make it taste better and add bulk. If you look up maltodextrin you will learn that it's a carbohydrate. Carbohydrates quickly turn to sugar as you digest them. Erythritol is a corn based sugar alcohol. Also, many of these big companies are getting their stevioside from China where quality control is questionable. Stay away from these products - Truvia, PureVia, Stevia in the Raw, NuNaturals and Sun Crystals. If you want to use stevioside, try Sweet Leaf. They claim to grow and harvest their raw stevia in Paraguay, where it's indigenous, and employ a water based extraction process to preserve more of the plant's 100 different nutrients. They only add inulin fiber as a digestive aid. 

Liquid Concentrate (Liquid Stevioside) - Many store bought brands are extracted from the white powder stevioside blended into either water or glycerin which sometimes also has added alcohol. You end up paying for mostly water with a very low percentage of stevioside. It's much more cost effective and superior to just make your own from the actual leaf. Check out this video on how to create a liquid extract from an espresso machine.

So to recap, make sure to look for the REAL stuff and read all the packaging labels and know where your plant came from if you didn't already grow it in the first place.



References:
http://www.stevia.net/varieties.htm
http://www.stevia.net/varieties.htmhttp://stevia-stevioside.com/purchasing_stevioside.php
http://kellycolby.com/blog/health/stevia-what-is-wrong-with-this-picture/
http://www.indiadivine.org/audarya/ayurveda-health-wellbeing/959810-stevia-raw-misleading-product-contains-dextrose-gmo-corn-some-contain-erythritol.html