Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
Stevioside is an intense sweetener found in stevia, an herb that's known pretty much for expressing this sort of molecule:
Stevioside, shown above, is a glycoside (that is, a glucose derivative) of a terpene. Unlike a lot of other sweeteners, stevioside is actually a sugar derivative (for others, see here, here, and here). I'm not sure if the sugar in steviosides actually gets metabolised, but it doesn't really matter, since it's a few hundred-fold sweeter than sucrose (so you'd eat a lot less).
I've tried stevia extract and thought it tasted unpleasantly like licorice. The pure molecule might be a little better.
Comments
Interesting you mention it tastes like licorice. The word "licorice" is derived from the Greek coinage "glycerrhizin" or so, meaning "sweet root"--same "gly-" as in "glycerine" and "-rhi-" as in "rhizome."
Posted by: Adam | October 6, 2006 1:01 AM
I have some stevia growing in my herb garden. The fresh leaves taste pretty sweet--oddly enough, they remind me a little of some artificial sweeteners. I don't get any of the licorice taste that you mentioned, so maybe that comes from the extraction process. We are drying some of the leaves down to grind into a powder that can be used as a sweetener.
There is some really interesting history to the stevia plant in the US. Apparently it's use and importation was shot down by the FDA beholden to sugar farmers... go fiigure. Background: http://www.stevia.net/fda.htm
Posted by: ricardog | October 10, 2006 3:23 PM
hello...
i need the chemical interactions of stevia molecule.
Posted by: johanna parra | March 27, 2007 5:01 PM