"Truvia": Way sweeter than sugar without the calories

A Better Life... Taking the pulse of health news
By Rita Rubin

You might soon see Truvia listed among the ingredients in your Diet Coke, not to mention a whole bunch of other sugar-free products.

Truvia, the brand name for a compound called rebiana, is an intense, no-calorie sweetener made from the leaves of the stevia shrub (pictured). It's 200 to 300 times sweeter than ordinary sugar. (I got to chew on a stevia leaf last summer during a visit to the lovely Montreal Botanical Garden, and I can tell you it's definitely sweet.) Cargill, a Minneapolis-based company, and Coca-Cola have been working on developing Truvia for four years.

Stevia has been used as a sweetener in Japan for more than 30 years, and it now represents 40% of that country's no- and low-calorie sweetener market, according to Cargill. In the U.S., though, the FDA has considered stevia to be an "unsafe food additive."

In a warning letter last August to the maker of Celestial Seasonings tea, an FDA official wrote that reports in the scientific literature "have raised safety concerns about the use of stevia," specifically its effects on blood sugar control, the reproductive and cardiovascular systems and the kidneys. (According to the FDA letter, Celestial Seasonings had marketed its Zingers Tangerine Orange Tea powdered drink mix as a dietary supplement, which could use stevia as an ingredient. Nice try, but a powdered drink mix is food, not a dietary supplement, the letter said.)

So what's changed? Cargill issued a press release yesterday to "introduce" Truvia after the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology published online a paper characterizing the properties of the sweetener and describing the development of a purification process. The authors, all Cargill or Coca-Cola researchers, describe Truvia as having a "clean, sweet taste with no significant undesirable taste characteristics."

Food additives don't have to go through the same regulatory process as prescription drugs, but the FDA does consider whether published or unpublished studies establish safety. In a separate press release yesterday, Cargill and Coca-Cola said the journal article "clearly establishes the safety" of Truvia. According to the press release, many existing stevia products contain crude extracts of the plant, while Truvia "contains only the best-tasting components of the stevia leaf."

I talked with Cargill's Ann Tucker this afternoon about when U.S. consumers might see Truvia-sweetened products at the grocery store. Her answer: By year's end, after Cargill and Coca-Cola have presented their research findings to toxicologists and other interested scientists. "Let's make sure that everyone agrees the science is complete," Tucker says.

Do you consume a lot of foods that contain low- or no-calorie sweeteners? Do you think you'd try Truvia-sweetened products?