Happened to stumble upon a packet of stevia , natural sweetener, 300 times sweeter than sugar, in an organic produce shop in Zurich, near Römerhof: Marktgalerie . Now available in powdered form, soon available as a liquid sweetener. Apparently, the sugar lobby wants it banned .... I wonder why
As I understood it, it is already banned in CH in liquid and powder form. You can buy the dry leaf to make tea and we know a friendly pharmacist who can order the powder or liquid from a supplier in Germany (where he says it is not banned) and sell it under the counter. Maybe he's wrong though. Use it sparingly instead of artificial sweetener.
It works but it made me dizzy. Not sure how but the correlation was immediate. So keep an eye out for the effect it has on blood sugar.
A bit old, but might be worth a read through: concerns about stevia
Jack
It's difficult to sort out the facts from the scaremongering. I don't know anything about stevia and I hope I haven't been careless. Of course, eating anything in excess can be dangerous. Just take a look at parsely, readily available in every supermarket with no health warning - and quite poisonous if you eat too much of it
A new one to add to my litany of office avoidance :
"Dear Boss, cannot make it into the office today, as I seem to have OD'd on parsley" ...
I love these studies.
I wonder what else in the world that we use on a day to day basis would cause such problems if a subject was subjected to high doses everyday for 2 years?
The average life span of a rat is 2-3 years perhaps the old boys were just slowing down due to the aging process? No, I'm sure this study must have had a control group that wasn't given stevia for two years
"When male rats were fed high doses of stevioside for 22 months, sperm production was reduced, the weight of seminal vesicles (which produce seminal fluid) declined, and there was an increase in cell proliferation in their testicles, which could cause infertility or other problems."
Do we know anything about Mrs Rat?
you can purchase liquid stevia, powdered stevia and concentrate at sweetleaf.com. There stuff is great!
Actually, Coop sells Stevia powder, now. They say you can use it like sugar, including baking. I tried it, but have to say that I am not convinced - even setting aside the health questions above, it is difficult to use, as 1g Stevia transforms to 10 sugar. This makes cooking / baking really difficult, as at least my kitchen scale is not totally reliable for these minimal weights. Things easily get oversweet or non-sweet. And the cookies did not rise.
Has anyone made similar experiences?
You can use it like sugar, but you can't completely replace the sugar with stevia in many recipes. There's a new "bakers blend" that contains sugar and stevia that you bake as normal with. Go to trivia.com for a look at the recipes they have and try again. I've used it once or twice and, while I'm not in love with it yet, I'm certainly warming up to it.