Stevia: Holy Grail in the fight against sugar (Dutch video)

Stevia is the latest alternative to sugar. Products with stevia retain their sweet taste, but contain up to 30 percent less sugar. Soda Giants add stevia to all their drinks. Coca-Cola recently introduced a version sweetened with stevia: Coca-Cola Life. Also Sprite is now sweetened with the natural sweetener. Before,  Coca-Cola did not want to add Stevia to its unique recipe. The new model has been given a green label and will be tested at this time in Argentina. Coca-Cola Life contains half the calories than the regular version.


The alternative sweetener

Stevia is actually called stevioside (E960) and is allowed as a sweetener in the European Union since 2011. The Guarani's used stevia plant in Paraguay and Brazil over 1500 for medicinal purposes. The white powder is up to 200 times sweeter than sucrose. You only need a little of it to give your products the sweet taste. In the seventies it was discovered that artificial sweeteners such as cyclamate and saccharin are possibly carcinogenic, and countries such as Japan began to offer stevia as an alternative.

A replacement for Aspartame


This sounds like the holy grail in the fight against sugar. Stephan Peters of the NutritionCenter does not think so. While it is good that there less sugar is used, according to Stephan, the stevia supplement has a rather bitter aftertaste. You can not go beyond 30 percent less sugar, says Peters. Business development manager Jeroen Knol says that stevia could well  supplant the artificial sweetener aspartame (E951)  . "It is natural and an alternative to sugar, because of the calories," says Knoll. Producers try to let it taste like sugar, just like they did with aspartame.

Translated from Source: NOS