Sweet on Stevia: Sugar substitute gains fans
Published Sunday, March 23, 2008
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Marjorie Milne of Colorado Springs swore off sugar 10 years ago, but she still indulges her sweet tooth without regret.
She does it without using saccharine, aspartame or any of those pink, yellow and blue packets of artificial sweeteners. Chemically engineered sugar substitutes aren’t her thing.
Instead, she reaches for a plant-based substance called stevia, which is said to be 300 times sweeter than table sugar and has gotten a reputation as the sweetener of choice for people with diabetes and those on low-carb diets.
Sharon Schulman, owner of Gentle Strength Wellness Education & Herb Shop in Colorado Springs, and her husband are such stevia fans that they won’t leave home without a stash. She carries a small vial of the liquid form in her purse.
"I use it to sweeten my water," she says. "In the summer, putting one or two drops in my water bottle helps me drink more water due to the great flavor."
Stevia is "an all-natural, calorie-free sweetener that is suitable for diabetics, safe for children and does not cause cavities," say Ray Sahelian and Donna Gates, authors of "The Stevia Cookbook" (Avery, 2004).
So where are all the ads proclaiming the wonders of stevia? Where are all the packaged sugar-free products - puddings, ice cream, cereals, hot chocolate packets - boldly announcing their switch to stevia?
Turns out this food product is not considered a food at all - at least not by the U.S. government. Instead, it’s categorized as a dietary supplement, making it something of a subversive among sweeteners.
A LONG HISTORY
Stevia - Stevia rebaudiana, in taxonomical terms - is a bushy plant that grows wild in South America. Its leaves have a very sweet taste and were thought to have been used by pre-Columbian Indian tribes in South America.
A Swiss botanist of Italian descent, Moises Santiago Bertoni, learned of the plant from Indian guides while exploring Paraguay in 1887. Excited about the discovery, he started an intensive study of the plant.
"In placing in the mouth the smallest particle of any portion of the leaf or twig," he wrote, "one is surprised at the strange and extreme sweetness contained therein. A fragment of the leaf only a few millimeters in size suffices to keep the mouth sweet for an hour; a few small leaves are sufficient to sweeten a strong cup of coffee or tea."
The plant was presented to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921 as a "new sugar plant with great commercial possibilities," but no one took much interest. Then, in 1931, the plant got noticed in France, where two chemists isolated the compounds that give the leaf its sweet taste.
Still, it would take five more decades before anyone north of the equator really figured out what to do with it.
The Japanese started using stevia as a table-top sweetener and sweetener for all sorts of foods, including ice cream, bread, candies and soft drinks. By 1988, Japanese food products sweetened with stevia accounted for about 41 percent of sweetened foods made in the country.
The stevia boom in Japan began to get the attention of U.S. food manufacturers in the mid-1980s, including Boulder-based Celestial Seasonings, which uses crushed stevia leaves in a few of its herbal teas.
Stevia also caught the attention of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which, in 1987, issued a ban on its use because it had not been approved as a food additive. That started several years of wrangling between natural-food advocates and the government. In 1995, the FDA issued a statement allowing stevia to be used as a dietary supplement, and that’s how it has to be labeled.
WAITING FOR RESEARCH
Despite glowing reviews, stevia has yet to win approval from the FDA, although it’s been used for years as an ingredient in Asia without any reports of adverse health effects.
And if a company with deep enough pockets could fund the necessary research and present results to the FDA, there might be a chance stevia could be approved as a food ingredient.
But because the FDA hasn’t OK’d it, several watchdog organizations, including the American Dietetic Association, are reluctant to endorse it.
"The FDA has not received sufficient scientific evidence to assure that this substance can be safely used as a food additive," the ADA wrote in a position paper on sweeteners.
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