Stevia: Sugar Alternatives to Cut Calories (& Carbs) While Keeping Dessert

The benefits and pitfalls of the most popular ‘natural’ sweetener. It all depends on where it comes from and how it’s processed! Learn the scoop on Stevia…

Let’s face it, while we all want to live healthy, we still want to enjoy something sweet now and then. I’ve written about the amazing Luo Han Guo Fruit — aka “Monk Fruit” (you can find that article here), but now let’s talk about the most popular of the newer natural sugar-alternative sweeteners: Stevia…

A Little Background.

The stevia plant (Stevia rebaudiana) is native to Paraguay in South America and has been used for hundreds of years as a sweetener in Brazil and Peru. An important note is that ‘stevia’ sweetener is not the plant, it’s the extract of the glycosides that occurs naturally in the plant. And this is where the ‘gotcha’ comes in.

A Tale of Two Techniques

The source of stevia is natural and plant-based and has no affect on blood sugar (and essentially no calories in the amounts needed to sweeten even the most luscious dessert!). But there are two ways to extract the precious glycosides: using water or using harsh chemicals. And the method using harsh chemicals is far more common and used by the vast majority of producers.

Why? It’s all about the leaf. The cell membrane of the stevia leaf is super tough. It’s part of what makes the plant so hardy. But it’s also the source of the bitter aftertaste. If you were to chew a raw stevia leaf, the hit of sweetness would quickly be overwhelmed by that astringent flavor. So chemicals like Ethanol (the corn-based gasoline alternative we see popping up in our car fuel) are used to quickly break down this membrane and eliminate that bitterness.

Hot water processing is an alternative to this, but it’s a slower and newer process, so only a select handful of producers do it this way. When we developed the formula for Cloud & Joy, we were determined we would only use the aqueous processed stevia for both the more mild taste, lack of residual chemicals in the sweetener, and more environmentally friendly processing technique.

One Plant. Many Sweeteners

The stevia plant has more than one of the glycoside sweeteners (called rebaudiosides) contained in it’s humble leaf. In fact, there’s a range tagged from A to M. The “A” version (shortened to “Reb-A”) is the most plentiful of these in each leaf and when isolated has less aftertaste than you get from the melange mix of glycosides. But the version with the least native aftertaste is the “Reb-M” version — which is the most rare in the leaf. As a comparison, Reb-A makes is found at about 2–5% in the leaf while Reb-M is about 0.1%.

As you can imagine, this makes Reb-M quite a bit more expensive, but the sugar-like taste and low amount of what we call in the biz “taste defects” are worth it. When developing Cloud & Joy, we were actually a little hesitant to use Stevia, but when we discovered Reb-M along with the water-based processing we knew we had something that could meet our standards.

What To Look for in Stevia Sweeteners

When it comes to off-the-shelf stevia sweeteners, unfortunately it’s hard to find products without these “gotchas”. A lot of packaged stevia sweeteners available in the grocery are mixed with sugar alcohols like ethyritol or even synthetic sweeteners. It doesn’t always even need to be disclosed because by law, since any ingredient with less than 0.5 grams per serving doesn’t need to be listed (btw, at Cloud & Joy, we actually list every ingredient, even those far below that threshold and never hide behind the term “natural flavors” to conceal ingredients).

The good news is that if you do that, you can’t use the term “pure” as in “pure stevia” — so look for products that use this term.

And of course, look for sweeteners that use the water-processed version. In our search, one that came up with this that hits these marks is “SweetLeaf®” Stevia Sweetener. There are pure stevia sweeteners out there that are processed with water. You might have to search a little and special order.

How Much to Use

Stevia is significantly sweeter than sugar per-gram, with 1 teaspoon of stevia having the sweetness level of a full cup of sugar. So even if it’s not perfect, the fact that you are consuming so little helps. But keep in mind when you use stevia to replace sugar that in many recipes — like baking, ice cream and more — sugar does more than just provide sweetness. It often controls the texture, freezing point and more (so take that into account).

Stevia can be a great source of low-calorie, non-glycemic sweetness provided you really look at the details. This is the second article in our series on alternative sweeteners (for our Monk Fruit article, see here). In our next article, we’ll talk about Allulose, the next big thing!