That's precisely why I use it in my coffee and have for many years. However there's a big difference from one brand to another I've found. Sweet Leaf stevia drops are the only kind I'll use now.
i use it too, because almost all the other brands have dextrose, which is basically actual sugar, or ehtyrithiol, which is a sweetener, but it can cause GI issues. I bought 2 boxes from amazon to try it out, its worht it. its pricey but not sugar is better.
some people dont like the taste of stevia, i used at least the ones that have actual stevia, and not just filled with dextrose, which is basically sugar, or ethyrithiol. its pricier and less sweet. ALot of stevia products will have sugar in it. i buy the sweet leaf, i heard you can get pure stevia leaves, but its expensive.
Stevia does have a bit of an aftertaste, but it's fine for me in, say, coffee.
IIRC, the major limiting issue with aspartame is that it's not heat-stable to the degree that sugar is, so there are a bunch of products that are made with sugar that you can't make with aspartame, problem for baking.
Aspartame is not heat stable and loses its sweetness when heated, so it typically isn’t used in baked goods.
There is no one alternative sweetener that has all of sugar's properties, just without the calories, which is what people really want.
Stevia has the aftertaste. Aspartame isn't heat stable. A lot of the sugar alcohols -- like xylitol, which is really common in sugar-free candy -- are laxatives, so if you eat that whole bag of candy, you are going to have horrendous diarrhea. You gotta use a patchwork of alternative sweeteners to replace sugar, based on the properties of a particular sugar use.
Might not be artificial, but it doesn't look natural in sweetener form:
The process of extracting stevia -
Dried stevia leaves are subjected to purified water first. Then followed by a precipitation process with ferric chloride and calcium hydroxide to remove non-soluble plant materials & other impurities and follow filtration.
Then the leaf extract goes through an adsorption resin, which is used to trap the steviol glycosides of the leaf extract.
Afterward, wash the resin with ethanol to release steviol glycosides and decolorize the resulting solution with activated carbon to remove the colors in leaves, and then concentrated by evaporation.
Again, go through the process of decolorization, filtration and spray-drying. The spray-dried product is then combined with similarly processed additional extracts, dissolved in ethanol and/or methanol, crystallized and filtered. Finally, after further processes of crystallization, filtered and spray-dried to obtain pure stevioside.
Dried stevia leaves are subjected to purified water first. Then followed by a precipitation process with ferric chloride and calcium hydroxide to remove non-soluble plant materials & other impurities and follow filtration.
So they’re washed with soap and water? Must we use the scariest language possible here?
Yeah Stevia tastes like poison to me, super bitter.
Basically all artificial sweeteners taste like either bitter or nothing at all to me. So I'm really angry when I buy a product I've been buying for years and it suddenly tastes like a Nintendo Switch cartridge.
Have we applied the same scrutiny to HFCS or refined Sugar itself? Or does sugar get a pass because it was the first plant processed for its sweetness?
Not only that, but unless you can guarantee that a significant portion users will recycle those aluminum cans, they are significantly more energy intensive to manufacture compared to single use plastic bottles.
When I'm out and about and looking for a drink on a hot day I'd love if regular unsweet tea was widely available. I hate buying bottled water but I also hate sweet drinks.
Stevie leaf extract is a petroleum base sweetener. It was used as an artificial sweetener , but then they found that it could be naturally occurring in small quantities and rebranded. It works like natural flavors where it can still come from petroleum so long as its naturally occurring with some source. I find it extremely bitter and soapy, just like almost every other artificial sweetener.
That's the trouble with words like 'artificial' and 'natural'. They mean nothing. It would be better to call them refined additives, because I expect the "stevia" would be in a refined, extracted form when added - whether substantially changed from the form present in the plant or not, this could be considered artificial, if we insist on using this word.
the oop said it came from petro, which isnt true. the substance which used to extract stevia isnt organic though, probably using an organic solvent, but they purify it to some extent. but alot of stevia brands only used the pure stevia from the plant.
i have no issue with stevia other than it tastes fucking awful. just a terrible aftertaste that makes me never want to consume it ever, in any configuration.
I hate this brand, we now pay 6$ for water from a stupid can instead of having water bottles at festivals for 1-2$, the dude who owns it is friends with insomniacs owner, ruined the water supply at every festival. Redbull is typically cheaper than water now at 4$.
No ppl dont think you're drinking alcohol like they claim its for, that has never been a valid reaon to grab it, we all know its water, someone asking you for some water should be the first clue ppl dont think its alcohol.
The reason venues live the cans is that that can't be recapped after opening, so they are harder to refill so you keep buying more instead of reupping in the bathroom.
They keep raising prices, keep overselling down to the night of, damn near get crowd crushed every other festival, I kinda stopped going to the more mainstream ones because of it
How about drinking water from the tap? Much cheaper, not wasting cans, and healthy. If you live in a community with bad tap water, write a letter to your local water board, and buy a filtration tank you can put in your fridge.
If you must really have flavor, buy some of the powdered dehydrated lime or orange powder packets.
Many municipalities across the US have poor quality or non drinkable water, and many more do not offer public access to water fountains. Thus, bottled water is a huge market in the US as free facilities are not always available.
I'm Canadian and I legitimately cannot recall the last time I bought bottled or canned water. I bring my two 18.9L jugs to the store to fill them with filtered water for $5 and that's the extent of my "bottled water" consumption. Elsewhere, I carry a metal water bottle I can get refilled anywhere for free.
I don’t know where you got that idea, but public tap water is federally regulated in the US (at least for now). Bottled water is popular because of marketing, not because tap water is unsafe.
Ahhh this line of logic. Yes, people can forego luxury items and save money while being healthier. You could never eat red meat, or drink soda, or have ice cream, sure, that would be much healthier and cheaper.
How were you convinced sweet tea was a healthy drink to begin with? https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-stevia Stevia to reduce the amount of agave nectar used is making it healthier if anything. Can you actually taste it if it's used sparingly in addition to real sugar?
I agree if it's the sole sweetener in a sweet thing. But if it's combined with real sugar in a only lightly sweet thing I find it unnoticeable. I recommend giving it a shot.
I'm sorry, you didn't actually think this beverage was healthy to begin with, right? Lol
For starters, agave is one of the highest fructose-containing sweeteners out there. Our bodies can't use fructose directly, so most fructose metabolism occurs in the liver where it's converted to glucose. Overconsumption of it may promote metabolic syndrome even more than glucose.
The only two sweeteners I use are date sugar (whole powderized dates), and rarely molasses. Unsweetened teas might be an acquired taste for some, but after getting used to it, they generally add plenty of sweetness on their own.
Not to mention that while it's OP's money, at least in the US, natural and artificial sweeteners (or flavors) can be chemically-identical. I remember a bit...might have been from NPR Planet Money...on a substance that literally could be obtained either way, but some people thought that artificial flavors were bad, so there was a market for companies to go out and (more-expensively) extract the thing so that they could make the food they made say "natural flavor" rather than "artificial flavor". The designation is just a function of whether you synthesize or extract the thing, the manufacturing process. It doesn't say anything about the actual content.
EDIT: Not the article I was thinking of, but same idea:
All three experts say that ultimately, natural and artificial flavors are not that different. While chemists make natural flavors by extracting chemicals from natural ingredients, artificial flavors are made by creating the same chemicals synthetically.
Platkin says the reason companies bother to use natural flavors rather than artificial flavors is simple: marketing.
"Many of these products have health halos, and that's what concerns me typically," says Platkin. Consumers may believe products with natural flavors are healthier, though they're nutritionally no different from those with artificial flavors.
I love how you say this, offer zero explanation as to why and just drop the mic.
I'm not here to defend Stevia, and I could give two shits about it; I'm here because I don't believe you, unless you please provide us all something to read, because we are done taking things people say at face value.
I'm fucking done reading shit on the internet where people say things and expect us to believe them at face value. You made this statement, and it isn't my burden to provide evidence to prove you correct, you will.
Please provide everyone here a link for us to read and change our minds.
The products containing them definitely taste weirder though.
Pepsi Max is about the only one that I think tastes decent. Fanta zero? Weird. Coca Cola Zero? Weird. Sprite Zero? Does nothing for me. Sugar free red bull? Ew.
Monster's white Ultra flavour, whatever it's called, is semi-ok. Watermelon Ultra is OK. But neither is as good as say, Aussie Lemonade, which has sugar in it.
Of course, I'm Estonian, so the baseline here is regular sugar, not HFCS. I love Fanta, but American Fanta was disgusting.
So, having a pre-chilled and conveniently-available product can be nice when you're away from home, but if this is for at home, have you ever considered just, you know, making a pitcher of your own drink with whatever you want? Maybe take a Thermos of the stuff chilled or iced if you're on the go? I mean, if you want agave as your sweetener, then you can make a drink with just agave and then tweak it to however you want. Food-grade citric acid is a preservative -- I have a bottle in the pantry. You can purchase all sorts of flavors.
Like, if you buy a premade good, then you can benefit from the R&D done by the company, but if you have extremely exacting demands that you feel no company is making, you can rage about it or just make what you want. In general, drinks have an enormous markup -- I mean, you're mostly buying water with a little flavoring and coloring -- so you can have exactly what you want and it'll probably be cheaper, too.
The only benefit this company offers with their beverages is the non-alcoholic-but-not-NA-beer tall-boy. My recovering alcoholic friend brings these to parties if he knows people will be drinking and just hold one and I've watched him go sober through so many situations where he'd probably have had a drink before.
Not that these are the only options for that, though, obviously.
This label part about plastics is what's called green-washing here, and is illegal unless what they are doing is a very signifikant part of the price of the product.
The labeling of what's NOT in the drink is also under similar regulation, but I don't recall what it's called. But the fact that a "sugar" drink doesn't contain fat is irrelevant and misleading.
Whatever country this is from has bullshit regulation.
The thing that is ABSOLUTELY NOT a problem is the Stevia which is clearly labeled!
So the "mildly infuriating" part is completely misguided compared to the real problems of that product.
Edit:
Just noticed, Carbs 3%, sugar 6% incl. added sugar 12%.
That's impossible! You can't have less carbs than sugar, since sugar is a carb. So these labels are probably illegal in EU on no less than 3 counts!!
It's a US label and the percents are % of recommended daily intake. So that's 3% of your daily recommended carbohydrate intake, 6% of your daily recommended intake of sugar, and 12% of your daily recommended intake of "added" sugar. The recommendation is something like, no more than half of your carbs should come from sugar, and no more than half of those should be added during manufacturing (i.e. most of your sugar intake should be from fresh fruit, etc.). So the numbers do line up.
In reality there is no recommended sugar intake. We can do perfectly well with zero grams of sugar every single day for a whole life, without it causing a single health issue.
So the label remains nonsense.
There is a recommended intake of vegetables and fruit, but not for sugar. Not by any factual based health measure.
The only country I know of, that could have this shitty and misleading label and still be legal is USA, but I don't know that for a fact.
I think if I saw these labels here in Denmark, I would call the police or health authorities immediately on the spot, which are responsible for enforcing declaration rules on items meant for consumption.
Those labels are not merely mildly infuriating, they are attempts at scamming consumers.
Not a significant source of saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol...
Those are the ones that are illegal, not protein 0g.
The fat parts are illegal because those are not normal content for that kind of product, trans fats are also regulated, and advertising that something is within regulation is illegal. Because it implies other products are not.
It's funny how some people can't even spot the problematic parts when pointed out, because they are so used to them.
Are they? These seem to be completely different products to me. One has caffeine and artificial sugar whereas the other has neither. I'd have a hard time believing these are the same products and not just similar ones with confusing names
Man fuck that. I wanted to try these specifically because they said they only used agave syrup as a sweetener. Stevia, suclarose and aspartame always have this weird aftertaste and mouth feel.
it has infected everything and it's fucking awful.
I'd be interested in finding out if there's a genetic component to this, like people who taste soap in coriander, because I can't believe any reasonable person would put this nonsense in anything they want to make a profit on.
There must be something. I see so many comments and how horrible it tastes and honestly I can't tell the difference. I sprinkle this stuff on my bran cereal and it tastes fine to me.