research sources (and stevia)

Polly758

I know it can be frustrating trying to do research on the internet. Scholarly journals cost money and unless you attend a University with subscriptions to the journals and databases, it's expensive to access them.

There are some free consumer sources such as PubMed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

Another option is Open Access Journals. These journals are based on new cost models and the articles are free to readers.

If you go to the Directory of Open Access Journals,
http://www.doaj.org/
and search the journals for a subject like "nutrition", you'll get a ton of free sources in that subject area.

THIS IS A NOT A GOOGLE SEARCH; you can't just type in "stevia". But once you've searched for "nutrition", you can select a journal; I've selected Food and Nutrition Research, a peer-reviewed journal from Sweden.
http://www.foodandnutritionresearch.net/index.php/fnr/index

Then search for "stevia". They only have one article, which tells you,

Stevioside

Stevioside is a glucoside of the diterpene derivative
steviol, extracted from the leaves of the stevia plant
(Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni). It is an intense sweetener,
200300 times sweeter than sucrose. Both the
plant and extracts of the plant have a long tradition
of use in South America. Stevia has been used for
several years in Japan.

The SCF [the EU's Scientific Committee on Food]
considered stevioside for the first time
during its comprehensive review of sweeteners in
1984 and found the compound to be unacceptable
as a sweetener (1). The review on the safety of
stevioside was updated by the SCF in 1989 (13)
and in 1999, following a submission of additional
information. The data considered by the SCF
indicated that the extract has the potential to
produce adverse effects in the male reproductive
system that could affect fertility, and that a metabolite
produced by the human gut microflora,
steviol, is genotoxic. The SCF reiterated its earlier
opinion that the substance was not acceptable as a
sweetener based on the available data (50).
In 1998 the SCF was asked to assess the safety
of leaves of S. rebaudiana Bertoni as a novel food.
The SCF concluded that the information submitted
on the plant products was insufficient with regard to
specification and standardization of the commercial
product and contained no safety studies (51).

If you want to be a real hero, go find another journal and keep searching. Don't just go with the first thing you find.

Another resource is Scientific Research Open Access, which is a bit more like Google. Search for "stevia".
http://www.scirp.org/journal/OpenAccess.aspx

The first search result tells us,

Conclusion: This case report indicates that chronic ingestion of sweetener stevia may induce edema, hypertension and hypokalemia via reduced conversion of cortisol into cortisone by inhibition of 11 B-Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase Type 2.

BioMed Central is another database which allows you to search more than one journal.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/

...journals like
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (IJBNPA), which doesn't actually have anything on stevia, but it sounds like it may be of interest to people here.
http://www.ijbnpa.org/

Search responsibly.