The news today is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no objection to the findings of an independent expert panel concluded that rebaudioside A (rebiana), the sweet component of stevia, is generally recognized as safe (GRAS) for use as a general purpose sweetener. This means that stevia can now be used in food products.

The first stevia product I’ve seen advertised is Truvia. It has been available in limited distribution since July of this year, but is now being advertised on television. Truvia will also be a sweetener used in processed food products.

Though this product has some advertising that wants to lead you to think it is natural, it is natural only in the sense that it comes from plants–it is highly processed, and not pure stevia. The first ingredient is eurythritol, then rebiana extracted from stevia, plus natural flavors.

Eurythritol don’t occur in nature in any appreciable amount that can be collected. There is no eurythritol hive or tree or plant. The amount that nature has provided in fruits and vegetables is miniscule, and in the context of lots of water and fiber in other nutrients. Though eurythritol is made through a natural fermentation process, it is a manufactured product–you can’t go collect eurythritol in nature somewhere and use it as a sweetener.

So what we have here is a combination of two substances that occur in nature in miniscule amounts (along with water and fiber and other co-factors), extracted and concentrated into a sweetener (with no water and fiber and other co-factors).

Stevia and eurythritol are perfectly fine to ingest in their natural context, but I would rather eat whole foods as nature intended, rather than concentrated extracts.

I do eat stevia. I pick the leaves from a pot of stevia plants outside my kitchen door and munch on them. I steep it along with other herbs to make sweet tea. But I personally am not going to put extracts concentrated by industrial processes in my body when there are many naturally sweet foods to enjoy.