I added a new plant to my herb collection. As someone looking to find healthy sugar alternatives, the Stevia plant was a 'must' for me. Stevia Rebaudiana is also known as 'sweetleaf' because the extracts of the plant are up to 300 times the sweetness of sugar! For centuries, the Guaraní tribes of Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil used stevia, which they called "sweet herb", as a sweetener in yerba mate and medicinal teas for treating heartburn and other ailments. More recent medical research has shown promise in treating obesity and hypertension. Stevia has a negligible effect on blood glucose, even enhancing glucose tolerance; therefore, it is attractive as a natural sweetener to diabetics and others on carbohydrate-controlled diets. Possible treatment of osteoporosis has been suggested as a benefit of the Stevia plant by the patent application claim that eggshell breakage can be reduced by 75% by adding a small percentage of stevia leaf powder to chicken feed. It has also been suggested that pigs fed stevia extract had twice as much calcium content in their meat, but these claims have been unverified.
The stevia plant may be grown legally in most countries, although some countries restrict or ban its use as a sweetener. A 1985 study reported that steviol, a breakdown product from stevioside and rebaudioside (two of the sweet steviol glycosides in the stevia leaf), is a mutagen in the presence of a liver extract of pre-treated rats — but this finding was criticized on procedural grounds that the data were mishandled in such a way that even distilled water would appear mutagenic.
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