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Stevia: What's New in 2019? Appetite, Food Intake, Fertility, Metabolism, Microbiome | Plus: Is Your Stevia 'Natural'?

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Stevia is available in all forms and combinations... often you don't realize before you take a look at the label that it was literally diluted with fillers and other sweeteners such as erythritol etc. Moreover, no one can reliably tell you if the exclusion of the "bitter stuff" and reliance on Rebaudioside A, exclusively, doesn't nullify some of the previously described health benefits of the whole plant. I was just about to simply add the results of a recent study to your daily dose of research news on " FB/SuppVersity ", when it occurred to me that it has been suspiciously quiet on the sweetener front , lately - specifically when it comes to stevia, a sweetener of which many people claim that it was "natural"... But is that true, is what you can buy at the supermarket or online really still "natural"? While the former is certainly a question of your definition of natural" (do you think a highly processed, isolated white powder ...
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Can Stevia Help You Ward Off Type II Diabetes? A Review

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Unfortunately, it is not even clear if you need the "white stuff", i.e. pure steviosides, whole leaves of leaf-extracts to maximize the anti-diabetic effects of stevia. What is clear, though, is that there's still a lot of research to be done. "Can Stevia Help You Ward Off Type II Diabetes?" That's not just the title of today's SuppVersity  article, it is also the research question of a recent paper by Esteves A.F. dos Santos from Farmácia Progresso  (dos Santos. 2016). An interesting question with an obvious answer: if you replace  sugar in your diet with stevia, it will help. Now, you know that this would not be worth discussing in a SuppVersity  article of its own. What is  worth discussing, though, is that stevia contains "compounds and other substance obtained from stevioside hydrolyses" (dos Santos. 2016) such as isoteviol  of which studies show that they can be used as 'active' diabetes treatments - meaning: they help, eve...
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High Dose Stevia Turns Weight Gain into Loss, Lowers Lipid and Glucose Levels not Only When Used to Replace Sugar - Effects are Mediated by Reduced Energy Intake & Utilization

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There's very little "natural" about the natural sweetener stevia when it ends up in your food in form of purified and decolorized steviosids. As a SuppVersity  reader you'll know that "natural" does not equate "healthy". This, the proven anti-microbial effects stevia exerts in your gut and the fact that the currently available steviosid-based stevia products undergo more processing steps than than the dreaded aspartame warrant the question whether (a) stevia is safe and (b) as effective as other sweeteners when it comes to weight loss promotion. Since the optimal dosage of stevia to achieve meaningful effects is also not known, yet, scientists from the  Alexandria University  in Egypt investigated the safety ad efficacy of different amounts of stevia sweeteners (25, 250, 500 and 1000 mg/kg body weight per day) as a substitute for sucrose on weight gain or the weight loss and weight management of female rats on an ad-libitum diet. You can l...
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Stevia Kills Good Gut Bacteria - One Study Enough to Stop Using the Natural Sweetener? Probably Not in View of its Anti-Diabetes, Anti-LDL, Anti-Viral & Anti-Cancer Effects

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Study indicates stevia kills healthy gut bacteria. So, how bad is it? Are the effects significant, will they have an impact on your overall health and does this mean you must not use stevia any longer? A recent study from the Institute of Microbiology and Biotechnology at the University of Latvia in Riga shows the impossible: Stevia, the "natural" sweetener that's everybody's darling, could mess up your gut microbiome by killing large numbers of the beneficial Lactobacillus Reuteri bacteria in your tummy - exactly those bacteria of which several studies have shown that supplementing will help cure acute diarrhea in young children (Shornikova. 1997), is capable of reducing frequency and intensity of antibiotic-associated side-effects during eradication therapy for H. pylori. (Lionetti. 2006), confers broad-spectrum protection against disease in humans and animals (Casas. 2000), has cholesterol lowering effects (Jones. 2012) and much much more. You can learn mor...
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Stevia - Natural Sweetener With Anti-Diabetes + Anti-Obesity Effects? Research Update: GLP-1, Insulin, Glucose Transport and Uptake, Inflammation, Bitterness & Safety

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Stevia is certainly one of the best choices to use as a sweetening agent. It is yet important to point out that this has nothing to do with the fact that it is "natural" - as "natural" as the white stevioside powder ism anyway. You may remember from the Facebook News that Ripken et al. reported in a recent paper in the  Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2014) that Stevia will stimulate the release of the satiety (and pro-metabolic) hormones GLP-1 and PYY in the stomach of our (digestion- & nutrition-wise) next relatives, the pigs. The results Ripken et al. presented about 3 weeks ago are yet only the tip of a whole heap of studies of which Nabilatul Hani Mohd-Radzman and colleagues believe that it is sufficient to postulate that the Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni plant "could benefit the community medicinally through several different pathways, all eventually leading to its antihyperglycemic qualities." (Mohd-Radzman. 2014) You can lea...
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