Thursday, May 15th, 2008
If Coca-Cola and Cargill have their way, the next calorie-free sweetener on dieter’s lips will be rebiana, a substance they’ve developed from the stevia plant.
New research published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology says the rebiana is safe to use as a general-purpose sweetener in foods.
The report says that consuming the equivalent of eight eight-ounce drinks daily sweetened with the compound (equivalent to 29 sweetener packets) didn’t affect blood pressure in healthy people or blood sugar in diabetics when used for four weeks.
What’s wrong with stevia?
Stevia itself has been used as a sweetener for centuries, particularly in Paraguay and Brazil. It is about 300 times sweeter than sugar and has been approved for use in foods in Japan, much of east Asia, China, parts of South America and Israel.
It can only be marketed in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as a nutritional supplement, not as food (and, in fact, Hain Celestial got in trouble earlier this year for marketing a drink powder that included stevia as food).
It’s banned for use in food in the UK and European Union, as well as in Singapore and Hong Kong. A British report on the plant says stevia was not approved because of “lack of information supporting its safety” and the worry that it could affect fertility and damage DNA.
The new study says that consuming as many as 1,000 servings of rebiana daily had no effect on a person’s general health, reproductive health, or growth and development of adults or their offspring (this part of the study was performed on rats).
The website promoting rebiana says that stevia doesn’t always taste great and has a “lingering aftertaste,” which their product does not have.
Making rebiana
According to the website, rebiana starts with stevia roots, which begin their life in a greenhouse and are then planted in a field. The sweetness develops as vacuoles form in the leaves, which hold both a sweet nectar and water.
The plant is harvested in late fall and dried, evaporating the water from the vacuoles and leaving the sweet stuff. The plant is then soaked in water, which breaks the walls of the vacuoles, releasing the nectar.
The dry plant matter is then removed and the water is evaporated until sweet crystals form, which can they be used as a sweetener. Cargill reports that the crystals from one plant can be used to sweeten 30 six-ounce cups of coffee.
That regulation problem
Coke and Cargill hope that the new study will make it possible to bring rebiana, which will be marketed as Truvia, to the market more quickly. But that means it will have to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration and similar agencies in other countries before it can be sold as food.
Still, the companies say they hope to get that approval this year so that it can be sold as a tabletop sweetener before the end of 2008. FDA approval will likely take two to six months, and the company did not provide a timetable for when products using the sweetener might be sold.
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