March 22, 2009

Excerpt from Bragg Veg­e­tar­ian Health Recipes — Chap­ter 21
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Ste­via is from a fam­ily of 150 species of herbs in the sun­flower fam­ily, native to sub­trop­i­cal and trop­i­cal South Amer­ica and the Cen­tral Amer­i­cas. Ste­via rebau­di­ana is com­monly known as sweet­leaf, sug­ar­leaf, or sim­ply Ste­via. It is widely grown for its sweet leaves. It has been used as a sweet­en­ing ingre­di­ent in foods and drinks by South Amer­i­can natives for many cen­turies. In its unprocessed form it is 30 times sweeter than sugar. Extracts of Ste­via on the mar­ket today are up to 300 times the sweet­ness of sugar. Ste­via and its extracts have been suc­cess­fully used in a num­ber of food prod­ucts in Japan since the mid 1970’s. It is very safe when used as a nat­ural sweet­ener and nat­ural alter­na­tive to sugar sub­sti­tutes, espe­cially for diabetics.

Ste­via extracts are sold in health food stores and the demand for this sweet nat­ural herbal ingre­di­ent is increas­ing. It is a low car­bo­hy­drate, low-sugar food alter­na­tive. Ste­via shows promise for treat­ing such con­di­tions as obe­sity and high blood pres­sure. It does not effect blood sugar and it even enhances glu­cose tol­er­ance. This makes Ste­via a deli­cious, nat­ural sweet­ener for dia­bet­ics and oth­ers on carbohydrate-controlled diets. Chil­dren can use Ste­via with­out con­cerns. It does not cause cav­i­ties. It can eas­ily be blended with other nat­ural sweet­en­ers, such as honey. Ste­via is heat sta­ble and could be used in cook­ing and bak­ing. How­ever, this requires some exper­i­men­ta­tion as it seems to work bet­ter in some recipes than oth­ers. It works very eas­ily in bev­er­ages and in liq­uid recipes. Ste­via is avail­able in health food stores in both liq­uid and pow­der (our favorite) forms. Cur­rently the FDA only rec­og­nizes Ste­via as an herbal sup­ple­ment and legal work is cur­rently going on to have Ste­via approved as a nat­ural sweet­ener for foods. You will note…that we rec­om­mend Ste­via as a nat­ural sweet­ener for some of our recipes. Exper­i­ment using Ste­via in recipes that you desire addi­tional sweetening.