How Does This Ayurvedic Food Improve Wellness?

CLINICAL AYURVEDIC REVIEW

The extraordinary powerful taste of stevia is difficult to ignore. The intensity makes your mouth water for a few minutes. Then, tingling sensations arise around the mouth. Your lip quivers.

It's simply unusual and unnatural to find a zero calorie sweetener. But leaves from the stevia plant are both. They are natural and zero calorie.

Stevia is very sweet, up to 150 times the sweetness of sugar. So a little goes a long way. When the sweet taste passes, it leaves a mild, licorice-like aftertaste that's slightly bitter and astringent.

It is light, cold, and sharp because of its intensity. Normally, sweet taste calms and sedates. But stevia is so intense that it has the opposite effect - adding to the quirky character of this unusual herb.

Some people love it. To others, it tastes terrible, almost like a chemical. That's because most stevia powders in the grocery store aren't whole stevia. They are a highly purified extract of stevia known as Reb-A. One student notes, "It lingers, a little like plastic or a foreign substance."

Footnote: The information for this article was in part gathered from a 2019 study and survey of 16 students of Ayurveda who experimented with stevia. During the study, students ate stevia for 3 days and journaled the pharmacological effects. This study was sponsored by the Joyful Belly School of Ayurveda, and specifically the Mastering Ayurvedic Digestion & Nutrition certification course.

What is It?

Stevia is a sweetener and sugar substitute derived from a remarkably sweet plant species called Stevia rebaudiana. It is an aster family plant native to Brazil and Paraguay. There, it has been used for more than 1,500 years by the Guaran? people of South America.

The secret to this zero calorie sweetener is the glucose residues bound to other non-sugar molecules. The glucose residues stimulate taste buds. However the sugary glucosides aren't digestible because they are firmly attached to the non-sugar molecules.

The stevia you buy in the grocery store does not contain the whole leaf, but a purified extract called rebaudioside A (Reb-A). This is because whole stevia hasn't been tested by the FDA. The FDA has tested the extract only. The FDA has approved whole stevia for use as an herbal supplement only. In Japan and Europe the raw stevia leaf has GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status.