Health & Science

The Tao of Stevia

Sizing up the latest entrant in the zero-calorie sweetener market.

  • Posted: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:15am
  • By Laura Moser

What fro-yo addict worth her Pinkberry card wouldn’t kill for a zero-calorie sweetener that doesn’t cause bladder cancer or carry the faint taste of rubber? And if it comes straight from the earth and not from the corridors of a scary laboratory? Why, even better.

That’s the edge stevia-derived Rebiudioside-A, the latest entrant in the zero-calorie sweetener market, has claimed over its pastel competitors: It’s totally 100-percent natural. Or so say the labels on Truvia and other newly popular sweeteners that use Reb-A, a “high purity” component of stevia, as their main ingredient. But is stevia really as pure and natural as manufacturers’ labels would have us believe? And, not unimportantly, how does it taste?

Indigenous South Americans have known of the sweetening powers of Stevia rebaudiana, which comes from the leaves of a South American shrub, for centuries, and the Japanese have cultivated it since the 1970s.

But stevia’s record in this country has always been spotty. It was banned by the FDA in 1991 after a study on rats showed adverse effects on fertility and even possible DNA damage. In 1995, four years after declaring stevia an “unsafe food additive,” the FDA softened this controversial ruling and allowed the importation of stevia, but only as a “dietary supplement,” meaning you had to hunt it down in the vitamin aisle. More than a decade later—in an astonishing stroke of corporate coincidence, soon after Pepsi, Coke, and related titans got involved—the FDA changed its tune again, granting Reb-A GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”) status.

And just like that, with a speed befitting its own scene in The Informant!, Reb-A was everywhere. Within nine months of gaining FDA approval last December, stevia derivatives had claimed about 10 percent of the sugar-substitute market. Market research has identified more than 110 new food, drink, and personal-care products made with stevia in 2009 alone. A recent tabulation put the stevia market at $100 million this year; another study predicted that this figure will grow to $700 million in the next five years. For now, Reb-A is still expensive—it costs more than twice as much as high-fructose corn syrup—but analysts expect the price to drop with the spike in demand.

But not everyone is feeling the stevia fever. Advocacy groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) have objected to the FDA’s rushed approval of Reb-A. Last summer, CSPI demanded more extensive testing before the release of Reb-A on to the marketplace, but by then there was too much money on the table to stem the tide.

These misgivings have done little to deter the many food and beverage makers scrambling to claim their corner of the stevia market. The two biggest-money entrants are Truvia (“Nature’s Calorie-Free Sweetener,” the lovechild of Cargill and Coca-Cola) and PureVia (“All Natural Zero Calorie Sweetener,” brought to you by Pepsi and the makers of Equal). There’s also Sweet Leaf (“America’s first 100% Natural Alternative to Artificial Sweeteners”), Sun Crystals (a combination of “cane sugar and the stevia plant—two of nature’s wonders under the same sun”), Stevia Extract in the Raw … and this is just at my local Safeway.

So how do all these new stevia permutations taste? If, as it’s been anointed, Reb-A really is the “holy grail” of the no-cal-sweetener market, it has to be pretty delicious—not that the extreme nastiness of aspartame did much to dim its popularity.

Tags: food, nutrition, shopper

Laura Moser is the co-author of the Social Climber Young Adult trilogy.

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