STEVIA INFORMATION

Stevia, a member of the Chrysanthemum family, is a plant native to Paraguay. It has been used by the Guarani Indians since ancient times. As a sugar substitute, it is available as a concentrated liquid, crushed leaf or concentrated white powder. The liquid and leaf forms have a slight herbal overtone, which reminds some of anise (licorice).

• The greenish-black concentrated liquid is 70 times as sweet as sugar. Common uses include adding to milk to sweeten cereal, tea, coffee and hot chocolate. The liquid can also be used in baking, but can discolor light colored foods, such as yellow cakes.
• The crushed leaf form is about 30 times as sweet as sugar. It usually comes in small tea-bag like packets in a box, is useful for sprinkling on top of cereal and other foods. The leaf particles do not dissolve, so kids might take a little time getting used to the floating leaves in their cereal.
• The concentrated white powder is 300 times as sweet as sugar. It is heat stable to 198 degrees C (388 degrees F).

Though Stevia has not been approved for use in the United States as a commercial food additive by the FDA, it is available in health food stores for personal use.

New Age Journal

[Holistic Health] [Whole Foods] [Psycho-Spiritual]
[Green Living] [Fitness & Exercise]
Sinfully Sweet?
Linda Bonvie and Bill Bonvie

New Age Journal, January/February 1996

While classified as a civil action, "the United States of America vs. forty cardboard boxes" had all the trappings of a big-time drug bust. It took place on a summer day in 1991, when a bevy of armed federal marshals raided the Arlington, Texas, warehouse of businessman Oscar Rodes, served him with a warrant, and proceeded to seize his most recent shipment. "They didn’t give me any advance notice or anything," Rodes recalls. "They came in my office in the warehouse, and that’s when they showed me the papers" and "took everything away." Rodes himself was not taken into custody. The arrest warrant was for the boxes he had just imported from South America, which contained some dried leaves and a white powder extracted from them. "They just asked me to open the warehouse door, and they backed up the truck and loaded it up," he recalls. "They said they were going to burn it. I was surprised-all the marshals, ready to go and take away my teas."

All this fuss over tea? Well, not just any tea. What Rodes had imported was stevia (Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni), an herb as remarkable as it is unknown in the United States. A perennial shrub of the aster family, stevia contains natural compounds-specifically, stevioside and rebaudioside A-that are estimated to be 150 to 400 times sweeter than sugar. Advocates claim that the herb also offers a host of health benefits, and is even a tonic for the skin. But here’s the clincher: Stevia sweetens without calories. While it tastes sweeter than honey, it’s about as fattening as water. Used for centuries in parts of South America, stevia has been discovered in recent years by much of the calorie-conscious modern world.

It is now widely-and legally-consumed by millions of people, from the plant’s native Paraguay and Brazil to South Korea, Israel, and the People’s Republic of China. But no country has done more to demonstrate stevia’s dietary and economic potential than Japan, where the herb and its extracts have been used since the 1970s.

The Japanese, having subjected stevia extract to extensive safety testing and found it without health risk, now incorporate it in numerous food products, including candies, ice cream, pickles, and soft drinks (including some reportedly manufactured by Coca-Cola)-products that might otherwise have been sweetened with refined sugar or chemical substitutes. In 1988, in fact, refined stevia extract commanded a 41 percent share of Japan’s multimillion-dollar market for high-intensity sweeteners-outselling even the ubiquitous American-made chemical compound NutraSweet. It might have been like that in the United States as well. Indeed, by the mid ’80s, a number of major food companies had recognized stevia’s potential value. Among those marketing or developing products containing stevia were tea makers Thomas J. Lipton Company, Celestial Seasonings, and Traditional Medicinals, as well as a host of smaller firms. (The herb was often listed on ingredient lists simply as "natural flavoring.") Estimates place the amount of stevia entering the country at that time in the hundreds of tons.

But just as the industry was poised to take off, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a particularly aggressive search-and- seizure campaign that was followed in 1991 by a virtual blockade of stevia through the issuance of an "import alert." In the fall of 1994, the agency was forced to modify the alert after Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which allows the herb to be sold if it is formulated and labeled strictly for use as a "dietary supplement." The agency still restricts stevia’s use in teas and other food products, however, and notes that any mention of the herb’s sweetening ability could bring its regulatory wrath. Just why the FDA would mount such a campaign remains a matter of much debate and speculation.

Citing a few small studies and its mandate to protect the public, the agency claims that stevia is an "unsafe food additive" and a potential health threat. Stevia proponents, however, maintain that the FDA’s case against stevia is without merit and note that a large body of research and the herb’s track record attest to its safety. The only health threat, they contend, is to the fiscal well-being of certain players in the $700 million US artificial-sweetener industry. As Rob McCaleb, president and founder of the Herb Research Foundation, puts it: "Sweetness big money.

Nobody wants to see something cheap and easy to grow on the market competing with the things they worked so to get approved." Indeed, a number of shadowy events involving stevia suggest just how far some companies are willing to go to keep the herb off the market. According to FDA records, for example, in the late ’80s representatives of an anonymous firm" lodged a "trade complaint" with the agency, charging that the Colorado-based tea company Celestial Seasonings was using stevia extracts in four of its products. The FDA will not identity the firm, nor say how the firm knew that Celestial Seasonings’ teas contained stevia. As a result of the complaint, however, the Agency began a full-scale investigation, after which Celestial Seasonings ceased using the herb-and then, according to documents obtained from the FDA, told the agency about other tea makers that were also using it.

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Last updated on Monday, January 04, 2010