Organic Newsletter
By Bruce Lee Deuley

 

Update on Stevia;

Last year I wrote an article for a magazine concerning my take on Stevia as a substitute for sugar in the diet and basically said from all I could find, it appeared to be safer and better than all the chemically based sweeteners on the market. It is derived from a plant and has a long history of being a safe alternative to chemical based sweenenters such as Aspertame, Splenda and Saccharin.

Now two new sweeteners called Truvia and PureVia were released into the American food supply in the first half of 2009.  They are derivative of a naturally sweet plant called Stevia, which has been used around the world for quite some to sweeten drinks and native dishes. Unfortunately, as seems to be true with almost everything the large corporations do, they can't seem to leave well enough alone and instead of just packing and selling Stevia in its easiest to make and safest form. They have to add their two cents worth of ingredients and take, what for all practical purposes, has been a safe and useful sugar substitute and make it a questionable supplement.

Truvia was jointly developed between the soft drink maker Coca-Cola and agribusiness giant Cargill while PureVia was developed by PepsiCo in partnership with artificial sweetener industry veteran Merisant (under the proxy Whole Earth Sweetener Company).

The idea of a real, zero calorie sweetener has been a goal of many agribusiness giants for some time but have Truvia and PureVia been adequately tested?  After reading a lot about the science surrounding these new sweeteners there seems to be some positives and some serious negatives.

Truvia and PureVia contain mostly the same chemical formula, Both are mostly made of two sweeteners, erythritol and rebiana (called Reb A in PureVia).  Erythritol is a substitute low calorie sugar-alcohol sweetener developed by the French company Cerestar who was later purchased by Cargill.  Sugar-alcohols are not really sugars; they require adding hydrogen to sugar molecules so the body ignores them.  Erythritol is a favorite because it supposedly does not cause as many stomach aches as some other similar sweeteners do.

We could spend more time on erythritol but there is not much new to report about it.  It has not been extensively used (up until now), it has not been extensively studied and it was approved quite awhile ago now.  It is basically an unknown entity at this time until more studies have been conducted.

PureVia, but not Truvia, adds in another sweetener called isomaltulose – another supposedly safe sweetener with just a little contract science behind it.  It is derived from regular sucrose to create a sweetener with a longer sustained energy release in the body.  The FDA gave this one a green light back in 2006 .  Again, it has seen very little use in the American food supply and we just don’t know very much about it scientifically beyond the fact that it does not harm teeth and also does not cause stomach aches.

The other major component of Truvia/PureVia, rebiana, is indeed a derivative of Stevia. It is not, however, the same derivative of Stevia's make up that has been being used for centuries, which is Stevioside. Stevioside was developed by the Japanese in the late 1970s and now controls 40% of the sweetener market in Japan – Stevias orgins are in South America, where it has been used medicinally for centuries by indigenous people.  Rebiana sweeteners represent the first commercial applications of stevia in the United States –.  Consequently, what we scientifically know about stevia is mostly based on stevioside, not rebiana – a problem that the big manufacturers seem to gloss over.

It would appear rebiana (along with erythiritol and isomaltulose) present little risk to people with high blood pressure and type II diabetes but in the world of science, your opinions are an extension of the crowd.  In a sense, you are only as good as those that have come before you.  With rebiana, there is no concensus, no crowd – so there is no way we can give any type of authoritative opinion on it yet.  The science surrounding erythiritol and isomaltulose are even more sparse.

 " While most of these studies appear to verify that rebiana et al., do not have toxic effects, they are all very short term and funded exclusively by industry." according to all I can find  It is beyond unlikely that any study funded by Cargill is going to show rebiana and Truvia to be anything but the safest sweetener ever to arrive be found on planet earth.  Having said that, some of their studies do appear to demonstrate the safety of rebiana but it so hard for me to believe these results with so much of their own money backing the studies these "facts" are based on.

While this is a huge step forward for these companies since it is the first step they have taken to produce something which is not chemically based. (they are actually using something found in nature) I am sure the real motivation is the bottom line and not the health of the consumer!

Still, major questions persist.  When will Truvia or PureVia ever actually be tested by an unbiased science group?  cCan we trust science sponsored by the same people who will gain from its results? What makes this better than just using regular old stevia? Nothing I can find so far.

I want to thank a long time listener to my radio shows and an old friend , Bob Champion for bring this information to my attention....Thanks Bob