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.