'Coca-Cola Life,' Stevia-Sweetened Cola, To Debut In Argentina
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Coca-Cola announced on Wednesday plans to sell the company's first stevia-sweetened Coke product, Coca-Cola Life, in Argentina beginning this week.
Stevia, a natural sweetener derived from a species of plants native to South America, Central America and Mexico, is sweeter than sugar but has no calories. Coca-Cola Life will have about half the calories of regular Coke.
The news comes months after Coca-Cola announced it would make over Sprite's recipe in the U.K., subbing in stevia for some of its sugar content. Around the same time, Coca-Cola U.K. released an anti-obesity television commercial.
Experts, however, question if soft drinks made with stevia are truly a healthy option for people suffering from obesity and diabetes. Following the Sprite announcement, Dr. Sharon R. Akabas, a director at Columbia University’s Institute of Human Nutrition, told The Huffington Post that she was concerned by the couching of the stevia-sweetened beverage against the backdrop of Coca-Cola's anti-obesity campaign. "It gives the impression that [drinking stevia Sprite] is a really healthy thing to do," she said, "but it's still ... calories of sugar, which has no nutrients."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/coca-cola-life_n_3516512.html
It's a good start
I know, the nay-saying ninny nannies will come here and tell us how bad soda is for us, but we make our own choices, the rest can stop interfering.
PS
I don't drink soda, nor do I smoke, but you want to bathe in the shit while smoking ten packs a day, be my guest.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Once I caught a whiff of the stuff I couldn't bring myself to taste it. 6 bucks shot to @#$%. 
We'll see if the same is true of stevia.
The diterpene known as steviol is the aglycone of stevia's sweet glycosides, which are constructed by replacing steviol's carboxyl hydrogen atom (at the bottom left of the figure) with glucose to form an ester, and replacing the hydroxyl hydrogen (at the top of the figure) with combinations of glucose and rhamnose to form an ether. The two primary compounds, stevioside and rebaudioside A, use only glucose: Stevioside has two linked glucose molecules at the hydroxyl site, whereas rebaudioside A has three, with the middle glucose of the triplet connected to the central steviol structure.
In terms of weight fraction, the four major steviol glycosides found in the stevia plant tissue are:
- 5–10% stevioside (250–300X of sugar)
- 2–4% rebaudioside A — most sweet (350–450X of sugar) and least bitter
- 1–2% rebaudioside C
- ½–1% dulcoside A.
Rebaudioside B, D, and E may also be present in minute quantities; however, it is suspected that rebaudioside B is a byproduct of the isolation technique.[2] The two majority compounds stevioside and rebaudioside, primarily responsible for the sweet taste of stevia leaves, were first isolated by two French chemists, Bridel and Lavielle (1931).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steviol_glycoside
That's what I use instead of sugar or artificial sweeteners, and I have for years. I don't drink much soda. I prefer water, or the tea I make at home. When I do buy and/or drink soda, though, I go with this:
