Monk Fruit and Stevia Explained - Ask a Nutritionist

Transcript:

AMY: Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist” podcast brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. We're thrilled to be celebrating 20 years on air, discussing the connection between what you eat and how you feel, while sharing practical, real life solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition. Thank you for your support and listenership over the years.

Now, let's get started. On today's show, we will be answering a question from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners. The question from our Facebook group today is, “Are monk fruit and stevia okay?”

Now this is a question I get asked about a lot. So I was happy to get to dive into the details of these two sweeteners and do more research to share with you all. The short answer is yes. For most people, stevia and monk fruit can be added to a balanced meal plan safely. We'll dig into all of the details about monk fruit and stevia so you can make the decision for yourself if they're products you want to consume.

Our community knows that reducing sugar intake and added sugar products is an important lifestyle habit. It can be important to help you lose weight, end sugar cravings, have balanced blood sugar levels. Along with that may come the occasional need for a little something sweet.

Avoid artificial sweeteners

And a sugar substitute makes it a little easier to eat less sugar. At Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we recommend avoiding artificial sweeteners like aspartame, which is that blue packet at restaurants, sucralose, the yellow packet, or saccharin, the pink packet. These artificial sweeteners can interfere with metabolism and may cause weight gain and affect brain health.

Are sugar alcohols okay?

If you see a sugar substitute that ends in -ol, that is a sugar alcohol. Examples are mannitol and sorbitol and erythritol. They're often found in things like protein bars, sugar free candies, and chewing gum. Generally, these are okay in small quantities, as long as you tolerate them.

Which sugar substitutes are okay?

Sometimes people notice sugar alcohols can aggravate digestive issues. If you have a little GI upset, I would avoid sugar alcohols until you heal your gut. So, what sugar substitutes do we recommend at Nutritional Weight & Wellness? We'll start with monk fruit. It's newer to consumers here in the United States, but it's been used for hundreds of years in Asia. Monk fruit extract is a sweetener from a fruit.

That's from the gourd family and vine ripened. It comes from southern China. While it's very rarely eaten raw, it's one of the popular nonnutritive sweeteners. What does nonnutritive mean? It's a sweetener that has zero or very little calories or carbohydrates. They are also called sugar substitutes or artificial sweeteners.

So once the monk fruit is ripe, it's dehydrated and made into a few different types of products. It can be made into a syrup, a granulated powder, or a concentrated liquid sweetener. Monk fruit contains a natural compound called mogrosides, which the body doesn't recognize as a carbohydrate or sugar, so it doesn't create an insulin response.

Stevia is a natural sweetener that comes from the leaves of a plant that is native to Paraguay and Brazil. It's been used for centuries by indigenous people, but started becoming popular commercially in the late 20th century. There are even some reports that stevia was used in Spain in the 16th century, but then used more commonly in other parts of Europe in the late 19th century.

All that to say is stevia has been around for a long time. The compounds that make stevia sweet are steviol glycosides. A couple of the common ones you'll see on labels is Rebodiocide A, or we'll call it Reb-A, and Stevioside. You may also see Rev M and Rev D. These are all varieties of that glycoside in stevia.

The processing of monk fruit and stevia can vary. The end product of monk fruit can be 150 times sweeter than table sugar, all the way up to 400 times as sweet as table sugar. Stevia can be between 50 to 300 times sweeter than table sugar, which is why a small amount of monk fruit or stevia goes a long way.

So, are monk fruit and stevia products good options for meeting your health goals? Well, so far, research on monk fruit extracts and stevia is positive. It shows that there are minimal effects on blood sugar levels after someone drinks a beverage sweetened with monk fruit extract or stevia.

Most of the trials that have been done on humans compare the sweeteners monk fruit, stevia, or sucralose, and table sugar on the basis of glycemic index and blood sugar control. As a reminder, the glycemic index is a measure of how quickly a food or beverage increases blood glucose levels, meaning the higher the value on the glycemic index, the faster the food increases your blood sugar. Which isn't a good thing, because that increases our risk of diabetes, creates more triglycerides, and can cause damage to our nerves.

Table sugar is rated as a 65 on the glycemic index. Honey is between a 45 and 64 and pure maple syrup is rated at a 54. Monk fruit and stevia are both rated as a 0 on the glycemic index because they contain natural compounds which the body doesn't recognize as a carb or a sugar. So it doesn't create an insulin response.

We're going to take a quick break, and when we return, we'll talk more about the safety of consuming monk fruit and stevia.

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Are monk fruit and stevia safe to consume?

So we're back, and so now that we know these sweeteners aren't causing your blood sugar to go up, the next question is, are monk fruit and stevia safe to consume? The FDA considers both monk fruit and stevia as generally recognized as safe. Which means that experts have evaluated the research on these products and concluded it could be safely added to food.

Animal studies have shown no adverse effects of high doses of monk fruit or stevia on rats and mice. There aren't as many human studies that have been done on monk fruit, but one study showed no adverse effects when the participants ate 60 milligrams per kilogram body weight per day of monk fruit, which is a much higher amount than what would typically be consumed by a person from foods sweetened with monk fruit.

And while studies have shown that stevia is safe, in the past there are a couple of studies done on stevia and the fertility of mice that drew a lot of attention. So I'm going to briefly tell you about those. One was back in 1968, and that was a study done on rats that gave them very high doses of stevia, and they produced less offspring than the control group.

Later, the author of that study said the amount given to the rats was an overdose of it, and there isn't any evidence humans would experience the same issues with fertility. Another study that's talked about was done in 1988 by Alvarez that showed the same issues with fertility. But that study was then discredited, and even Alvarez, the author of the study, went on to say that his newer research has led him to believe that stevia is safe for human consumption.

Multiple studies since then have shown that stevia does not have any adverse effects on fertility. So, besides being safe for use in humans, there have been a number of studies showing that there might actually be benefits also to using stevia as a sugar replacement. I found studies over the past 10 or so years that showed stevia could lower blood glucose, decrease blood pressure, and improve metabolic function. Most of these studies were done on rodents.

Other studies have also shown that monk fruit contains high levels of antioxidants and may be anti-inflammatory. So, what should you pay attention to when choosing monk fruit or stevia? Well, know monk fruit is a member of the gourd family. So, if you're allergic to gourds, you might be at a higher risk to being allergic to monk fruit.

The stevia plant is related to ragweed, chrysanthemum, and sunflower seed plants. So some experts recommend avoiding stevia if you have an allergy to any of those plants. There have not been any reports of stevia related allergies in the literature, so it's rare to have an allergy to stevia.

Points to be aware of when shopping for stevia or monk fruit

Stevia can cause bloating, nausea, dizziness, and numbness, but this is very rare and often from ingesting large quantities of stevia at a time. But good to know in case you do experience any of these symptoms, you might want to find a different product to use. Another issue with both monk fruit and stevia is when other ingredients are added to them. Often, monk fruit and stevia contain an additive like erythritol that's used to add bulk to the sweeteners.

Erythritol is a sugar alcohol that contains about 70 percent of the sweetness of sugar. Because monk fruit and stevia are so sweet, very little is used, and erythritol is added to them to give them a more sugar like crystal appearance and texture. Erythritol was in the news recently because of a study that showed people with existing risk factors for heart disease, like diabetes, were twice as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke if they had the highest level of erythritol in their blood.

There are a few issues with that study to be aware of that I'll briefly go over, including the fact that the researchers didn't measure the amount of erythritol that was given to the participants in the study, their blood level of that erythritol. This is important to note because erythritol can be made by humans in their own bodies as a response to eating glucose and fructose.

And it can be higher in people with insulin resistance and high blood sugar, regardless of whether the person ate erythritol at all. So the participants in this study might have had higher rates of erythritol in their blood because their body made it related to their underlying health issues and not from consuming it from a product that contained erythritol.

All of that to say is that there definitely needs to be more research on the use of erythritol. You can also find both monk fruit and stevia without the addition of erythritol as well if you want to avoid that additive until more research is done on its safety.

How is the taste of monk fruit and stevia?

So, what about the taste of monk fruit and stevia? One benefit of monk fruit is that, unlike some sugar substitutes, monk fruit has very little to no aftertaste. Most people also like the taste of stevia, but there are some people who have a genetic variation to tasting bitter foods and may find stevia more bitter than others. The taste of stevia can also vary depending on what form it's in, so powdered stevia might taste different to you than liquid stevia. If these are products you want to use, you might need to do some experimenting to find which one you like the taste of best.

Recap

So, to recap today's podcast, yes, monk fruit and stevia are recognized as safe to be used as a more natural sugar substitute that won't raise your blood sugar. It is important to note when choosing to use stevia and monk fruit sweeteners that because they can be multiple times sweeter than sugar, the sweet taste may trigger your cravings, even though it's technically sugar free.

So I would recommend focusing on eating real food in balance and using stevia and monk fruit for an occasional sweet treat. If you do find yourself experiencing more food and baked good cravings, choose a balanced meal or snack and you can help curb those sugar cravings.

Thank you so much for listening to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist”. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, so we can help even more people discover the connection between what they eat and how they feel.

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