Stevia plant

Stevia, 12 42-43 Stevia plant, 24 239 Stevioside, 24 239-240 Stibabenzene, 3 72 Stibaboranes, 4 204 Stibiconite, 3 41 Stibine, 3 57-58 Stibine oxides, 3 73-74 Stibnite, 3 41 Stibonic acids, 3 72 Stichtite, 6 471t... 

Bertoni, a plant native to Paraguay and now commercially cultivated in Asia and South America. Several extracts from the Stevia plant ate available which contain different levels of stevioside and also other sweet compounds (rebau-diosides, dulcosides). This inconsistency of extracts is probably the reason much variation exists in the data about stevioside. 

High intensity sweeteners include both natural and synthetic compounds. Saccharin and aspartame are synthetic. On the other hand both stevioside and ribaudioside-A are natural high intensity sweeteners derived from the Stevia plant. Aspartame and glycosylated stevio-sides are commercially produced with enzymes. 

A literature search could not reveal any publications about a possible allergenic activity of Stevia plants, dried leaves or stevioside itself Kinghom came to the same conclusions no published reports have appeared that would suggest that extracts of Stevia leaves are immunologically active when taken internally [36]. Similarly there is no evidence that any of the constituents of Stevia caused allergic contact dermatitis. 

Stevia is a commercial name for em artificied sweetener and is also the common name for the plant that it is extracted from. Steviol is the basic structure of this class of sweetener, but when sugar molecules are attached to steviol (making it steviol glycoside) its sweetness skyrockets to hundreds of times that of regular sugar. This sweetener has been in use for centuries in South and Central America and in Japan since the 1970s. In the United States, it s only been available for a few years as a purified compound (marketed under the name Truvia ) raw plant extracts of the stevia plant are not approved for use in the United States. 

Figure 4A.21 Steviarebaudiana. (a) Stevia plant (b) Stevia field (Picture (a) and (b) Foundation of Humanity and Development "F.H.D." Guido Herrera, with kind permission) (c) Dry leaves of Stevia rebaudiana (d) chemical structure Stevioside (e) chemical structure Steviol (f) chemical structure Rebaudioside A.

Crammer, B. and Ikan, R. Sweet Glycosides from the Stevia Plant. Chem. Br. 1986,22, 915. 

Rebaudioside A, a naturally occurring glycoside about 400 times sweeter than table sugar, is obtained from the leaves of the stevia plant, a shrub native to Central and South America. 

Rebaudioside A (trade name Truvia), a sweet glycoside from the stevia plant (Section 21.1C)... 

Truvia is a natural sweetener from the stevia plant composed of different sweet and bitter glycosides, extracted from leaves but with fermentation processes in development (see Section 27.3.2). 

Stevia Sweeteners (brand names PureVia, Sun Crystals, Truvia) are highly purified steviol glycosides, found naturally in the stevia plant. They contain zero calories and are about 2(X)-300 times sweeter than sugar. 

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE ON FOOD, Opinion on Stevia Rebaudiana Bertoni plants and leaves, SCF/NF/STE/3, Bmssels, European Commission, 1999. 

The plant Stevia rebaudiana bertoni has been studied in depth because it was discovered that this plant is the source of six sweet-tasting diterpene glycosides. They are stevioside, rebaudiosides A, C, D, E and dulcoside A. (Table 1). These sweet diterpene glycosides, as well as a complex mixture of organic compounds of which more than a hundred compounds have been identified, are found mainly in the leaves of the plant. The leaves contain a complex mixture of labdane diterpenes, triterpenes, stigmasterol, tannins and volatile oils. There is an abundance of reviews and patents relating to these sweet diterpene glycosides. 

Dobberstein RH, Ahmed MS, Extraction, separation and recovery of diterpene glycosides from Stevia rebauAiana plants. US Patent No. 4,361,697, 1982. 

High-performance LC is routinely used for the analysis of stevia sweeteners in plant material or in food and beverages. The first successful HPLC separation of stevioside and rebaudioside A... 

In the European Union there have been several petitions to approve stevia and its products. In 2000, the EU Commission refused marketing authorisation for Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni plants and dried leaves as a novel food or novel food ingredient (Official Journal of the European Communities, 2000). In October 2003, the SCF rejected a request to re-examine the restrictions on the uses of extracts of stevia. Its comment, after throroughly examining the evidence, was that the committee has serious doubts about the safety of stevioside and does not consider it acceptable for use in food (European Parliament, 2003). 

Figure 4. Metabolites from feeds of steviol (ent-13-hydroxykaurenoic acid) and ent-kaurenoic acid to the GA mutant Bl-41a of G. fujikuroi. Steviol is found as a glucoside in the higher plant Stevia rebaudiana it is not found in the fungus.

Steviosides and iibaudioside-A. Stevioside and ribaudioside-A (13-glucosyl stevioside) both occur naturally in the plant Stevia rebaudiana, with the steviosides comprising 10-20% of the dried weight of the leaves. Ribaudioside-A may constitute as much as 60-70% of the mixture for some strains of the plant (23). While stevioside is about 150-300 times as sweet as sucrose, the flavor profile has a bitter... 

This sweetener is extracted from the Peruvian plant Stevia rebaudiana. It is legal in Japan but not elsewhere. 

Stevia and stevioside are imlikely to give rise to nutritional, microbiological, toxicological and/or allergenicity problems. The use of Stevia by eg. Paraguayan, Japanese, Brasilian, American and other people has never led to the demonstration of problems of this kind. In the literature no reports on detrimental effects of either the living plants, or the dried leaves or stevioside can be found ([6] see also all the references cited above). 

An X-ray analysis of rastevione, the main constituent of the roots of Stevia serrata and S. rhombifolia, has revealed it to have structure (284).144 This definitive assignment calls into question the relative stereochemistry assigned to more than fifteen other longipinene and longipinane derivatives isolated from various plant sources (see Vol. 7, p. 75, Vol. 9, p. 110, Vol. 10, p. 34). The tiglate (285) has been isolated from Eupatoriadelphus purpureus.lib... 

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