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Today,
you can find several forms of stevia extract in natural food stores as
a dietary supplement. Other natural
sugar alternatives include Luo
Han
Guo and sugar
alcohols such as Maltitol,
Sorbitol,
Xylitol
and
Erythritol,
which are derived from fruit or other natural products, but
have less disadvantages.
I
recommend you visit Andrew's site for
further reading on these and other sugar
substitutes.
Stevia sweetener in its raw
form is 100% natural
and derived from the stevia plant, which was
discovered in Paraguay, and centuries later fully examined for the
first time at the end of the 19th century by a Swiss botanist called
Bertoni.
The
elements - otherwise called 'glycosides'
- that give the plant its
sweet taste, are called stevioside and rebaudioside A: the higher the
percentage of these substances in the plant, the sweeter it will
taste.
Sunlight
and warmth are the biggest factors in upping this
percentage, which
explains why the plant propagates so well in South America. If you are
looking to grow stevia yourself through any number of ways, that is
perhaps the most important factor to take into consideration.
 Up to
this point, stevia has always been a big thorn in the eye of the
Food and Drug Administration and conglomerates producing sugar or
aspartame. Because it is a natural product, stevia in its unaltered
form can not be patented,
and poses a serious potential threat to
profits. Both Coca Cola (with Truvia)
and Pepsi (with SoBe
Lifewater
and PureVia) are working on a range of soft drinks containing
artificially altered stevia as you are reading this.
There
is an all-natural alternative for the big companies though: Zevia
is a
soda with stevia that's on the rise, and it has already received plenty
of acclaim from both consumers and connaisseurs, despite being a new
player on the market!
As opposed to the dangers
of artificial sweeteners, you will find when
browsing this site that stevia has been used for centuries in Paraguay
as both a sweetener and a medicine for many ailments, including
diabetes and obesity, since the stevia herb has no calories and no
glycemic index.
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