It's relevant because being able to say you use a natural sweetener will greatly increase your potential customer base. Regardless of the actual merits of "natural," a whole lot of people believe in the merits.

Most things can be toxic in high doses. Yes, being natural doesn't say much but I wasn't trying to relate that it's healthy for you just because it's natural.

Sure, I'm just wary of the term 'natural' when it comes to food. As far as I know it confers no benefit on the food item except making consumers feel good about it; i.e., as a descriptor it has little beyond marketing value.

This. The term "natural" when it comes to food doesn't even necessarily mean it's not synthetic! Just that it is "derived" from something natural. [1]

[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...

To stay on topic, I'm calling Stevia natural as a comparison to sugar coming from sugar cane, which grows in nature and not in a lab. No marketing speak here.

I updated my original comment to describe what I was talking about when saying "natural"

You still didn't give any reason why something that is natural should be preferred over something that is synthetic or lab grown.

Honestly, other than fear of 'teh chemicals,' I can't think of a reason.

I'm not a chemophobe by any means. I'm also not anti-lab grown products. Providing for a world with 7+ billion population requires some of this. However, we have decades of studies proving what natural food does to the bodies and we're still learning what synthetic and lab-grown foods do. And yes, I realize this statement can't really apply to Stevia considering the lack of studies into its health on the human body. But I'm responding to your general idea, not specifically to Stevia.

> we have decades of studies proving what natural food does to the bodies

You are making the false assumption "natural" foods are a correlated group as far as health goes. This is empirically false (ignoring the fact that natural has no scientific definition to begin with). Studying sucrose won't inform you of the dangers of cyanide though both are "natural".

To stay on topic, I'm not talking about anything other than stevia coming from leaves of Stevia rebaudiana whereas sugar comes from sugarcane. The process by which these two plants grow is natural and not synthetic. I'm not getting into the pointless debate about food being "natural", which I think is complete marketing hype.

The point is that research on sugarcane has little to no bearing on what research on stevia would uncover. The fact we think sugarcane is safe is not evidence in favor of stevia. Just because both happened to evolve with little human interference doesn't correlate their effects on the body in any way.

The exception is if we can prove the two operate under the same fundamental mechanisms within the body. But there's nothing different about natural growing plants and man made substances under this sort of research. A molecule is a molecule.

I disagree. Natural doesn't mean healthy, but all else being equal I would prefer to eat something that wasn't synthesized and consider a non-synthetic option to be "healthier" by my definition of what is healthy. And what makes something healthy is more than just the effects of consuming it.

Well that's not true. Saying it's natural suggests that we have atleast evolved with it in the environment, likely interacted with it at times and have developed biological means of interacting and dealing with it. If something is not natural (i.e. doesn't normally exist in nature), then we would not have developed a biological response to it yet, which means it frankly more dangerous because the body does not know how to deal with it.

> Saying it's natural suggests that we have atleast evolved with it in the environment, likely interacted with it at times and have developed biological means of interacting and dealing with it.

The post you replied to has already refuted your argument. We evolved with poisonous mushrooms in our environment and our body's "means of dealing with it" are to die. That's hardly the gold standard for biological responses, don't you think?

Well that's definitely not true. Many of the most potent toxins known to us are produced by living organisms – for an example, actually read the comment you replied to. You can find examples of substances that are spectacularly lethal to us from all of the five major kingdoms of life. Merely saying something is natural does not imply we co-evolved with it at all, and even if we had, it doesn't automatically follow that selection always gives us the means to "deal with it" in the way you suppose.

I get your point, but as the above poster said, often the body's way of dealing with things is to suffer and/or die. So...how is having an existing way to "deal with it" terribly helpful?

(Not trolling, seeking honest clarification)

Yeah. I think the "natural" people aren't saying all natural things are better than all man-made things. e.g. Poison ivy tea isn't better for you than Pepsi.

But, looking at what generations of long-lived people tend to eat[1] is probably a reasonable guide to nutrition and health. Manufactured/artificial stuff simply isn't on that list since that stuff hasn't been around long enough to be part of a multi-generational study.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100...

Actually, zero calorie stuff is pretty much by definition stuff we haven't decided to "deal with". It doesn't get absorbed directly, and we never created a means to break it down into something that could be absorbed. The goal for a non-caloric sweetener is to be noticed by receptors on the tongue by chance while the rest of your body explicitly ignores it. Biological response is the "problem".

You can make the same argument for poisonous mushrooms, but I wouldn't recommend consuming them.

> There's no reason, based on that information, that I should expect it to be any more or less toxic than Splenda.

The fact that it's present in large quantities in at least one living organism shows that it's not fundamentally incompatible with life. And that's especially true in this case, where (according to Wikipedia) there is a 1,500 year history of human use. So all else being equal, I would expect it to be more likely to be safe than some random chemical with no basis in nature.

Out of the 2,000 species of mushrooms in North America, there are maybe 10 that are deadly poisonous. You think your chances of dying after randomly mixing up some unknown chemicals in a lab are really less than 1 in 200?