Better Health Through Honest Dialogue
Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D, explains why eating refined sugar can make you feel worse, and why so-called “healthy sugars” aren’t really good for you either.
Holistic Anarchy presents the views of Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D and Lawrence B. Palevsky, MD. (Please click on the page tabs above for more information about us and the Holistic Anarchy mission.)
Holistic Anarchy is an educational resource; it is not to be construed as giving individual medical advice. Each person must take responsibility for his or her own health, and consult with his or her own trusted health care practitioner to make health care decisions. Thanks for visiting!
Dear Annemarie Colbin,
I have read (and am using) your books. I also have read about stevia (and used it a bit). I would be interested to read your views on this natural sweetener.
The news that triggered me to ask this now is this study quoted below, and I think stevia will have the same effect:
A study by scientists in the US suggests that eating artificial sweeteners could make people put on weight because experiments on laboratory rats showed that those eating food sweetened with artificial sweeteners ate more calories than their counterparts whose food was sweetened with normal sugar. The study is the work of Drs Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson, two psychologists based at the Ingestive Behavior Research Center at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, and is to be published in the February 2008 issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).
The authors suggest that a sweet taste may cause animals to anticipate the calorie content of food, and eating artificial sweeteners with little or no calories undermines this connection, leading to energy imbalance by increasing food intake or reducing energy expenditure.
Dear Aletta,
As you know, stevia is a Paraguayan herb. As such, it starts out like a green leaf. If you purchase stevia as a white powder, you already know it has gone through a lot of processing. I personally wouldn’t trust it.
If as they claim, stevia has no calories, it is equivalent to artificial sweeteners in that it gives a sweet taste and so confuses the insulin system - insulin WILL be released in response to the sweetness, even if the blood sugar does not rise. Thus, the stage is set for eventual insulin resistance — in other words, the body cries wolf. As you yourself point out, the research seems to indicate that any kind of sweet taste with no calories confuses the body and leads to energy imbalances.
Also, see the following notice, in that the FDA is warning about the use of stevia.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN1841210720070918?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews
That said, Dr Josehp Mercola has some interesting thoughts on the issue. See http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/10/02/uh-oh-fda-now-calls-stevia-unsafe.aspx
(copy the URL’s into your browser to get to the references).
So there you have it. In the long run, you have to make up your own mind!