The Use of Sweetners and the Rise in Obesity - Essay Example

Sweeteners got introduced to help reduce people’s intake of sugar. A sweetener can be best described as matter used to sweeten a drink or food. This is usually in place of sugar. They became classified into two main categories: the nutritive sweeteners. These are the sweeteners that get digested in the body only to some extent; they became known to provide food energy value to the body. For example, glucose, honey, maltose and invert sugar. The other category of sweeteners is the nonnutritive sweeteners (Mendosa et al, 2008).

These do not get digested as in the case of the nutritive sweeteners. It is because of this that they get said to contain an insignificant amount of food energy value. Examples include cyclamates, sucralose and stevia. One of the sweeteners used in place of the sugar is Stevia. This is a natural nonnutritive sweetener. It gets derived from the leaves of the Bertoni plant which naturally occurs in the forests of southern America. Its name got given after the botanist explorer who discovered it in 1908.

He was an Italian by the name Dr. Moises Santiago Bertoni. This plant had been in existence for a couple of years. The native population knew and termed it as kaa he-he, which meant honey-leaf (Etkins, 1997). They used its leaves to improve on the taste of their bitter tea; they as well as chewed on the leaves for their sweet taste or in medical potions. It was after Dr. Bertoni’s discovery that such a little known and rare plant became well known and famous. His discovery enabled the plant to be accessed by many people other than only those who had access to its naturally occurring habitat.

These being the native Indians who originally occupied the land before the explorers came. In 1908, the first dried leaves of the plant got harvested and produced as a sweetener. It was not until 10 years later that the plant got brought to the attention of the United States government