A spoonful of stevia - herbal sweetner - Answering Machine

Vegetarian Times, Sept, 1997 by Lee Reilly, Jeanne Rattenbury

The answer depends on who you ask. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stevia is an untested and therefore, unapproved, food additive that could reduce fertility in humans. Herbalists and natural" food activists say that stevia is a fantastic gift of nature, a safe, non-caloric, herbal sweetener that literally grows wild in Paraguay.

The controversy around this unusual herb has some interesting twists. For instance, for two decades the FDA has refused to approve GRAS ("generally recognized as safe") petitions for stevia as a sweetener. GRAS petitions declare that a food additive is "generally recognized as safe" because a scientific review deems it so or because the additive was commonly used without incident before 1958. Yet, under the grandfathering powers of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the FDA has approved stevia as a dietary supplement. In other words, the agency does not allow Americans to ingest stevia as the sweetening ingredient in, say, a bottle of diet ice tea but does allow Americans to buy a bottle of stevia as a dietary supplement and squirt a couple of drops into a cup of tea made at home.

Why? Again, it depends on whom you ask. The FDA says that the policy makes regulatory sense, even if it appears contradictory. "In each case, the stevia goes into die same mouth, it's true," admits agency spokesperson Judith Foulke, "but, in each case, it's regulated by different laws." Natural food activists claim that die FDA's behavior is motivated by a trade complaint, presumably from a consumer food company that would be hurt by competition from a new, natural, low-calorie sweetener, which is already being cultivated in Brazil and China.

The allegation has at least some basis in fact. The FDA does admit that it received a trade complaint, and it is likely that some American companies are spooked by stevia. After all, stevia represents almost 40 percent of the high-intensity sweetener market in japan where it's used in gum soda and ice cream. However, the FDA insists that its concerns are strictly health-related. "We welcome good science, but there are too many doubts about stevia's safety," says Foulke.

The safety issue is similarly rife with contradictions. The FDA's concerns center on a study that shows lowered fertility in laboratory animals fed a diet containing stevia. However, according to Douglas Kinghorn, Ph.D., professor of pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois-Circle in Chicago, the study was conducted 29 years ago, and since then no one has been able to reproduce the results. "They can dig up any studies they want," Kinghorn says of the FDA, "and they don't seem very judicious about which ones they choose. "

In a sense, the studies should be irrelevant, points out Rob McCaleb, founder and president of the Herb Research Foundation, a non-profit organization located in Boulder, Colo. A GRAS petition can rely on the standard of uneventful, common usage, and certainly stevia, a favorite of native Paraguayans for hundreds of years and that has been available in the United States since the turn of the century, qualifies as commonly used. Moreover, a natural substance should not be treated as if it's a newly formulated, chemical additive, says McCaleb; the food-additive law was never intended to cover things such as parsley, sage, rosemary or stevia.

Unfortunately, the stevia conundrum will not be resolved soon. "It will probably never be FDA-approved until someone with lots of money wants it to be," says McCaleb, noting that the FDA approval process cost the manufacturer of aspartame many millions of dollars. In the meantime, stevia is available as a dietary supplement. What does it taste like? It is extraordinarily sweet, with herbal overtones and a slight aftertaste reminiscent of -- ironically -- saccharine. -- L.R.