Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni, a plant related to sunflowers and marigolds, produces a variety of high-potency low-calorie sweeteners in its leaves. It is native to Paraguay where it has long been used by the Guarani people as an herbal sweetener called Kaá Heé.

Dr. Moises Santiago Bertoni, a Paraguayan botanist, learned of the stevia plant in 1887 while exploring Paraguay’s eastern forests with Indian guides. But it was twelve years before he was able to find the plants themselves and discover how extremely sweet their leaves are.

The sweet compounds found in stevia leaves are steviol glycosides which are heat and pH stable, non-fermentable, and do not darken upon cooking. The sweetest and most desirable of these glycosides is rebaudioside A which is more than 150 times sweeter than table sugar.

A selective breeding program in Ontario, Canada, is aimed at increasing stevia’s rebaudiside A content and improving its agronomic and disease resistance characteristics. In Japan, stevia is a very widely used sweetener. This is also true in other countries, including China, Germany, Malaysia, Israel, South Korea, and in parts of South America as well.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has been carrying on what can only be described as a “schizophrenic” campaign both for and against the use of stevia:

• On the one hand, the FDA has treated stevia as if it were a narcotic—making it the subject of searches and seizures, attempted book-burnings, trade complaints, and embargoes on importation. Despite overwhelming evidence of stevia’s safety and efficacy as a low-calorie sweetener, the FDA refuses to allow it to be sold as a sweetener. However, thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (passed in 1994 despite the opposition of the FDA), stevia can nevertheless be sold as a “nutritional supplement” as long as it is not labeled a “sweetener”.
• On the other hand, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration, the government agency most responsible for the so-called “War On Drugs”) is encouraging stevia cultivation in Paraguay as a substitute for marijuana farming. (See http://www.stevia.net/safety.htm)

The genus Stevia (pronunciation: STEH-vee-ah) was named for P.J. Esteve, a Sixteenth-Century Spanish botanist. (See http://fisher.bio.umb.edu/pages/JFGenus/Jfgen65.htm)