Review: Celestial Seasonings "Zingers To Go" tea mix

I LOVE, LOVE this herbal tea drink mix. It has no calories yet is a tad sweet due to the Stevia (love it!!!) and gives me that afternoon "pick me up" that I so need after lunch. I am sooo using it as a part of my weight-loss plan. Buy it, its worth it!!

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Love this stuff too! But can't find it now because it has natural stevia not chemical sweetener. FDA alert indicating that food products containing Stevia shall be detained at the border and refusal to import.

Hain Celestial Group Inc., the maker of Celestial Seasonings teas, received a warning from U.S. regulators that some of its powdered drink mixes contain an unsafe herb.

Some Celestial Seasonings tea mixes, called Zingers to Go, contain a South American herb, stevia, that must be removed from the products, the Food and Drug Administration said in a warning letter posted Tuesday on its Web site.

Stevia is a main staple sweetener in many countries, including Japan and China, where it's found in multiple food products. Companies including Coca-Cola Co. and Cargill Inc. have been developing products that substitute stevia for artifical sweeteners like aspartame, but the FDA currently bans any food product from containing the natural sweetener.

''While FDA has received inquiries and petitions for the use of stevia or stevia extracts in food, data and information necessary to support the safe use have been lacking,'' according to the FDA letter. But on the FDA's own website, a GRAS petition submitted to FDA in 1995 cited over 900 Stevia studies, none of which indicated any safety concerns regarding human health.

According to the American Herbal Products Association, "Stevia leaf is a natural product that has been used for at least 400 years as a food product, principally as a sweetener or other flavoring agent. None of this common usage in foods has indicated any evidence of a safety problem. There are no reports of any government agency in any of the above countries indicating any public health concern whatsoever in connection with the use of stevia in foods."

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