Anyone use stevia in place of sugar? In a fit of impulse buying, I bought 100 packets of this stuff from the health food store.

Stevia is a herb native to Paraguay that is very sweet. In pure extract form, it is said to be 5-10x sweeter than sugar. Most importantly however, it has 0 calories. A natural sweetener that is more powerful than sugar, with no calories whatsoever? Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

After trying a couple of packets, I have noticed that it has a slight aftertaste. It's not unpleasant, but there's a noticeable lingering licorice flavour. Also, since it's in powder form, it probably doesn't work well in baking as a sugar substitue.

What I'm most interested to find out is if there are any health concerns associated with Stevia. I've been googling like mad, but I haven't been able to turn up much of anything. One person on another forum said that it lowers your blood pressure, but I haven't found anything to corroborate that.

Also, if you're interested in reading more about Stevia, check out www.stevia.net (http://www.stevia.net). It's an abombination of webdesign, but it has some interesting info about the plant.

I recently tried stevia myself. Mine had a really unpleasant aftertaste, but I've read that this differs between different brands, so I haven't given up on it yet.

It certainly works as advertised - one single drop of the stuff in a whole cup of yogurth is more than enough to replace two teaspoons of sugar. I think it must be the sweetest substance I've ever tasted.

I will try a few more brands and see if I can find one I like better.

I've used it pretty regularly for the past couple of years with no adverse effects yet.... that I know of, anyway!

I've not really used it in cooking... I usually sweeten my oatmeal with one packet of stevia and one packet of the "pink" sweetener, i.e. saccarine. I sweeten my mug of green tea the same way.

I switched to stevia when I started reading concerns about aspartame.

I think stevia is probably the "safest" of all artifical sweeteners since it is the least "artifical"

All the others such as aspartame, splenda, saccharin, etc are synthetic chemicals. I use all of the above and I think basically they are pretty safe as long as you dont go overboard. If you were using 20packs of apsartame a day that might be bad. Compared to all the pollutants we are exposed to living on this planet I'd say sweeteners are pretty tame.