Dr. Rachel Cheatman, Phd
Executive Director of the GSI

What are steviol glycosides?
You have the stevia growing on the ground, it has a little green stevia leaves and in fact we don’t eat or even chew on that whole leaf. Many hundreds of years ago people on south America really did chew on a whole leaf and you certainly can. But if when we look at putting stevia into baked goods or into yogurt or into some kind of ice tea or beverages we want to get the peace of the leaf that’s really delivering the sweetness. And it turns out when you look at leaf there are lot of this different compounds called steviol glycosides – some sweeter than the others..some are earthiness than the others do in terms of the flavor profile it’s a plant, a natural plant that’s gonna have some variability. So we look at the leaf we figure out which steviol glycosides is really delivering the kind of sweetness for a certain product that we want to develop and we isolate that particular glycosides.