Sweetener stevia: what it is, INS 960, taste and safety

What is stevia?

It usually starts at the shop shelf. A green pack says "stevia", it costs a few times what sugar does, and the back lists things you cannot pronounce. Someone at home has been told to cut sugar, so you want to know what this leaf actually is before it goes in the chai.

Stevia is a sweetener made from the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana, a plant native to South America. The sweet part is a group of compounds called steviol glycosides, the best known being stevioside and rebaudioside A, and they are 200 to 400 times sweeter than table sugar [1].

It is a non-nutritive sweetener, which is the technical way of saying it provides no calories [2].

The word "natural" needs one plain sentence. The phrase natural sweetener stevia is fair in the sense that it starts as a plant, but what you buy is a purified extract, not crushed leaves.

In the United States, the FDA has accepted GRAS notices only for high-purity steviol glycosides, 95% or more, while whole leaf and crude extracts are not permitted there as sweeteners [1].

So when you set it beside the other plant-derived options in our guide to the ingredients in sweeteners, think of it as a leaf refined to its sweet part. That is the fairest one-line description of sweetener stevia.

INS 960: the name on an Indian label

Turn the pack over and the word stevia may not appear in the ingredient list at all. What you find instead is a number.

The International Numbering System (INS) code for steviol glycosides is 960, and Indian labels declare a food additive by its functional class together with either its name or its INS code [3] [5]. So "Sweetener (INS 960)" or "Steviol glycosides (960)" on an Indian pack is stevia extract.

There is a second line to look for. Under the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations 2020, a steviol glycoside pack sold as a table-top sweetener must carry a "Contains" declaration naming the sweetener with its purity and the weight percent of its marker compound [5].

That line is the useful one. It tells you how much of the pack is really stevia extract and how pure that extract is, and a pack that leaves it off is not following the rule.

Where to look: the ingredient list and the small-print box beside it, usually on the back or the side panel.

Drops, powder, tablets, sachets: what you are really buying

Here is the part most packs do not spell out. Pure stevia extract is so sweet that a spoon of it would be unusable, so a powdered sweetener stevia pack that measures like sugar has to be mostly something else.

The ingredient list settles what that something is. By law the ingredients run in descending order by weight, so the first name is what most of the pack is made of [5]. If the first ingredient is dextrose, maltodextrin or a sugar alcohol, that is the bulking agent, and the stevia extract sits further down the list.

Before you buy stevia sweetener online, read the first two ingredients and the "Contains" line; the photos on a listing rarely show the back. If you are buying for someone with diabetes, what stevia means if you have diabetes covers the blends in more detail.

Liquid stevia sweetener

A liquid stevia sweetener is the simpler product: stevia extract in water, sometimes with a preservative, and no bulking agent to measure with. A stevia drop sweetener is dosed by the drop, which is why the bottle is small.

Tablets and sachets sit in between: a fixed dose of extract on a carrier, so one packet sweetens the same every time.

Why stevia can taste bitter

Most people who dislike stevia say the same thing: the first sip is sweet, then a bitter note hangs on at the back of the tongue. That is not your imagination, and it is not a bad batch.

Our tongues carry about 25 kinds of bitter-taste receptor, and in laboratory tests two of them respond to steviol glycosides. How bitter a glycoside tastes also depends on which glycoside it is, which is why extracts differ and why brands blend them [4].

In the kitchen it means two things. Use less than you think, because more extract means more of the bitter note along with the sweet; and if one brand tastes bitter, another with a different glycoside mix may not.

In our survey of our own buyers, 12% said they used stevia before switching to us, and 31% said they chose us for no bitter aftertaste.

Is stevia sweetener safe, and how much is too much?

The honest answer has three parts: what the Indian label rule requires, what the daily limit is, and where the research stops.

The label rule is the one above: the pack must name the sweetener and its purity. The limit comes from the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, which set an acceptable daily intake of 4 mg per kg of body weight a day, expressed as steviol, a figure the US FDA also uses [3] [1].

In kitchen terms, the FDA's own worked example says that for rebaudioside A the limit comes to 12 mg per kg of body weight, or about 27 table-top packets a day for a 60 kg adult, each packet as sweet as two teaspoons of sugar [1]. Two cups of chai a day with a packet each sit far below that.

Steviol glycosides pass through the upper gut unchanged: the digestive enzymes there do not break them down, and they are not absorbed through the upper part of the gut [1].

Now the limits. The WHO's 2023 guideline advises against using non-sugar sweeteners, stevia included, to control body weight or cut disease risk, and says the advice does not apply to people who already have diabetes [6].

In a two-week trial in 120 healthy adults, stevia changed the mix of gut bacteria, as each of the other three sweeteners tested did in its own way; it was saccharin and sucralose, not stevia, that significantly worsened blood sugar responses [7].

Blood sugar in one line: in a trial of 30 healthy men, a stevia-sweetened drink caused no spike in glucose or insulin, unlike a drink with 65 g of sugar [8].

For sweetener stevia in a daily chai, then, the side effects people search for come down to the aftertaste, the filler, a gut-bacteria change seen in one short trial and the WHO's weight-control advice, within that daily limit. For the same questions across every sweetener, read how safe sweeteners are, one by one.

Using stevia in chai, coffee and baking

Chai is where most Indian kitchens meet stevia first, and where most mistakes happen. The usual one is treating a drop like a spoon.

With a bottle of drops, start with fewer than the label suggests and add one at a time. Chai mein do boondein, phir taste karo. Drops mix straight into hot or cold drinks, so coffee, nimbu pani and lassi work the same way.

Powder measures more like sugar, which is the filler's job; the trade-off is that you are mostly spooning filler, so read the first ingredient before you measure.

Baking is where stevia's sweetness works against it. A pinch of extract carries the sweetness of a cup of sugar [1], and that is the problem: a cake or a ladoo needs the cup, not the pinch, for its bulk, so a recipe written for sugar needs another ingredient to make up the volume.

Those are the stevia sweetener uses that work: drops for drinks, powder when you want to measure, and some patience with baking.

Sweetener stevia and monk fruit: our pick for daily chai

Give stevia its due. It is sold everywhere, in every format, and its high-purity extracts carry the US GRAS notices we mentioned above. For a lot of people it does the job.

Then the fair comparison. Monk fruit (Siraitia grosvenorii, luo han guo) is a fruit from southern China whose extract is 100 to 250 times sweeter than sugar depending on its mogroside content, and like stevia it is non-nutritive [1] [2].

In the US, the FDA has closed seven GRAS notices for monk fruit extract with "no questions" [9]. In the same trial of 30 men, the monk fruit drink also caused no spike in glucose or insulin [8].

Its limit, stated plainly: monk fruit has fewer long-term human studies than older sweeteners such as stevia; what is known about monk fruit's safety sets out the studies that exist.

Our pick is ours, with the criterion stated. For daily chai, where you taste the sweetener on its own several times a day, we pick a monk fruit sweetener made without sugar alcohols, on two grounds: taste and a short ingredient list.

People searching for the best sweetener stevia makes usually mean the one with the least aftertaste; if you have tried two brands and still notice it, this is the swap we make. We sell ours as drops and powder, with sachets coming.

	Stevia	Monk fruit (made without sugar alcohols)
Comes from	leaves of Stevia rebaudiana [1]	a fruit from southern China [1]
Sweet compounds	steviol glycosides [1]	mogrosides [1]
Times sweeter than sugar	200 to 400 [1]	100 to 250 [1]
Calories	zero [2]	non-nutritive [2]
US FDA position	no questions on GRAS notices for 95%-purity extracts [1]	no questions on seven GRAS notices [9]
Taste note	bitter aftertaste some people notice [4]	the swap we make when that aftertaste bothers you
Our pick for daily chai	Moderate confidence	Our pick, High confidence

How we compared: "confidence" is how sure we are of the pick for daily chai, judged on taste and a short ingredient list; it is our view, not a grade of the research.

Cheat sheet

• INS 960 on an Indian ingredient list means sweetener stevia, that is, steviol glycosides.
• Read the first ingredient: it is what most of a powder is; the "Contains" line tells you the purity.
• Start with fewer drops than the bottle says and add one at a time.
• The daily limit is about 27 packets a day for a 60 kg adult; a few cups of chai are nowhere near it.
• If the aftertaste bothers you, a monk fruit sweetener made without sugar alcohols is our pick for daily chai; the main types of sweeteners covers the rest.