You may find stevia in your local Farmers’ Markets as green plants. The leaves of these plants are sweeter than sugar. While the leaves may be eaten, the FDA doesn’t yet consider them GRAS (generally recognized as safe). However, stevia extract from this plant is GRAS… within a certain threshold. The extract has 0 calories, but lends a taste sweeter than real sugar. Knowing that the non-sugar sweetener industry is worth over $13 billion, it’s no wonder that stevia is a serious competitor against other sweeteners known to have unhealthy side effects; and unlike other non-nutritive sweeteners, stevia does NOT increase insulin levels (like sucrose or aspartame).
On the flip side stevia can present healthy benefits, such as
- Having a lower blood-sugar after consumption compared with sugar; Exercise caution with stevia if one is already taking insulin or diabetes medications.
- Having a blood pressure lowering effect in those with mild essential hypertension
- Showing potential to significantly improve biomarkers for chronic kidney disease
- Being useful in treating acute and chronic live disease
- Showing potential in preventing dental carries
- Inhibiting the proliferation of gastro-intestinal cancer cells
- Showing anti-proliferative effects in other cancers (cervix & pancreatic)
After seeing all the potential benefits, one might want to start consuming it all the time, but I always caution my clients that it is an additive. And the WHO believes that we need to keep additives below a threshold not to exceed 4mg/kg of body weight (equals 1.8mg/lb of body weight). So if you multiply your body weight (lb.) x 1.8, you will get the number of mg of stevia to stay UNDER. So perhaps if you stay under 2 stevia sweetened drinks/day – you may be okay; but you can’t start putting it into everything to satisfy the American sweet tooth. That said, it is a great strategic tool to transition the palette to needing less sweet taste. Using stevia as a step-down tool in resetting the palette is a great use of this natural sweetener.
The risk of consuming stevia include:
- Maintaining a sweet tooth and increasing the risks of overeating, obesity, and metabolic syndrome, a precursor to diabetes.
- Becoming prey to marketing of Stevia under brands (such as Truvia) but are just a mixture of highly processed sweeteners; so label reading is important when seeking out pure Stevia products.
- Going over the WHO threshold for GRAS – and then becoming susceptible to other illness
- As with all new products and processing, there is active research of negative health effects yet to be proven. With the case of stevia, there may be the possibility of stevia’s natural component chemicals increasing the likelihood of genetic mutations or cancer.
One should always speak to their medical practitioner before ingesting large amounts of anything new, like Stevia.
