My parents texted me about this "zevia" soda shit that's sweetened with stevia extract which is supposedly 0 calories, thus healthy. but knowing other "diet" sodas that doesn't mean its good for you, and i can't find any studies on the effects of it and i'm super confused. apparently indigenous people would use the whole leaf as a sweetener, but the extract may be different? is it a fruit juice situation, where removing the rest of the leaf removes all of the healthy shit? does anybody know?
Stevia is a plant, literally an herb. The fresh leaves, when chewed, has a sweetish taste to it from some other chemical compound other than "sugar". If you're drinking hot stuff, you can drop whole fresh leaves into the hot liquid to steep and that should draw out some of the sweet flavor.
Get a bunch of leaves, dry them and grind them into a powder and you've got a sweetening agent that can be spooned out and mixed into things.
Not terrible for you like aspartame might be or with some dodgy gastro-intestinal effects of xylitol.
Sources: I worked at a grocery store that catered to the hippyish crowd for a long time and my spouse does small scale farm work at home and tried growing stevia for funsies.
interesting, thank you!
Looks a lot like basil iirc