A Healthy No-Calorie Sweetener

By Mary Mucci

I hardly ever eat sugar.  I read "Sugar Blues" {William Duffy} years ago about how aging sugar is…and I've been cutting back over the years. Just yesterday, I had some and I didn't feel well afterwards.  Just a couple of cookies and I was sluggish and a little bloated.  But I don't have any such concerns about stevia. It's now my only sweetener. That wasn't always the case.  The brand I used to buy tasted bitter.  Now, most brands have managed to take out the bitter component.  My favorite is Now because it contains a blood sugar regulator which also helps with dieting.

For years stevia was hard to get.  It was sold only as a dietary supplement. That means while anyone can use it anyway they like, in desserts as well as coffee, manufacturers couldn't use it in anything.  So naturally, only health food nuts like myself knew about it.

That's about to change.  Coke will soon be selling a new diet soda sweetened with an extract of stevia.  The extract will also be on store shelves, it's called Truvia.  Hopefully, in the process of extracting the sweet component the manufacturer won't adulterate it with a chemical.

So why another diet drink?  Well there have been so many lawsuits from the other chemical sweeteners that the soft drink companies have been looking for an alternative.

Wonder why stevia has never been approved for use in food?  Well we can only speculate: that the diet food industry wanted to control the use of stevia until they had a patentable version of it that they could use.

Stevia is available in all health food stores, natural food supermarkets and a few places one wouldn't expect like Value Drugs in Huntington.

It would make sense for the FDA to finally give their blessing to stevia .  That doesn't mean it will happen. Still you don't have to wait… I'm glad I didn't.

Stay well,

Mary Mucci

Contact:

Lauren Grossman,

Value Drugs Nutrition

631 427 2919