The New Generation of Sweeteners

A plant by the name of Stevia has been getting a lot of attention recently. It seems promising as a new generation of no-calorie sweetener: Great news for people watching their waistline as well as people with diabetes who limit their intake of sugar. One company, Cargill, manufactures a product made from Stevia under the brand name, Truvia.  Pepsi-Co is working with The Whole Earth Sweetener Company and they call their version PureVia.  Here’s the scoop: Truvia and PureVia both contain Rebiana.  This is a derivative of the leaves of the stevia plant. The companies that manufacture it (Cargill and Coca-Cola) report it “only consists of the best-tasting components of the stevia leaf”. The sweet leaf of the stevia plant is dried, steeped in water, and further purified to provide a calorie-free sweet taste.

How Many Calories Do You Need?

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One question people ask all the time is “How Many Calories should I be eating in a day?”  Well, it’s a complicated answer because there are so many factors that determine your actual energy needs.  One factor is how much lean body mass you have.  Muscle burns more calories than fat, as you’ve probably heard.  What gives some people more lean body mass than others?  Besides being muscular, being male usually means you have more lean body mass than a female of the same height and weight.  Being taller means you have more lean tissue than a person who is shorter.  And aging usually results in a decrease in lean body mass.  Therefore, tall, young men burn about twice as many calories (about 3000) as short, older women (about 1500).  There are calculations, such as the Harris-Benedict equation, that you can use to find your energy needs pretty accurately by inserting your age, gender, height, and weight.  However, this assumes you are not greatly overweight (once many fat pounds are involved it’s hard to determine the metabolic activity of your total weight) and you also must be able to factor in your activity level; it’s all an estimate!

Welcome to The You On a Diet Blog

You On a Diet is proud to announce the launch of our blog.  Over the next few weeks we will be dedicating a lot of time and resources to beef up the content for our readers.  You can expet to read hot topics and other tid bits to keep you entertained while you lose weight.

Be sure to sign up for our RSS feed so you can be notified when new posts are released and when new recipes are added.  Thanks again to everyone for their support and we look forward to