- For hundreds of years, people in Paraguay
and Brazil have used a sweet leaf to sweeten bitter herbal teas including
mate. For nearly 20 years, Japanese consumers by the millions have used
extracts of the same plant as a safe, natural, non-caloric sweetener.
The plant is stevia, formally known as Stevia rebaudiana, and today it
is under wholesale attack by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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- Stevia is a fairly unassuming perennial
shrub of the aster family (Asteraceae), native to the northern regions
of South America. It has now been grown commercially in Brazil, Paraguay,
Uruguay, Central America, the United States, Israel, Thailand and China.
The leaves contain several chemicals called glycosides, which taste sweet,
but do not provide calories. The major glycoside is called stevioside,
and is one of the major sweeteners in use in Japan and Korea. Stevia and
its extracts have captured over 40% of the Japanese market. Major multinational
food companies like Coca Cola and Beatrice foods, convinced of its safety,
use stevia extracts to sweeten foods for sale in Japan, Brazil, and other
countries where it is approved. Europeans first learned of stevia when
the Spanish Conquistadors of the Sixteenth Century sent word to Spain that
the natives of South America had used the plant to sweeten herbal tea since
"ancient times".
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- The saga of American interest in stevia
began around the turn of the Twentieth Century when researchers in Brazil
started hearing about "a plant with leaves so sweet that a part of
one would sweeten a whole gourd full of mate." The plant had been
described in 1899 by Dr. M. S. Bertoni. In 1921 the American Trade Commissioner
to Paraguay commented in a letter "Although known to science for thirty
years and used by the Indians for a much longer period nothing has been
done commercially with the plant. This has been due to a lack of interest
on the part of capital and to the difficulty of cultivation."
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- Dr. Bertoni wrote some of the earliest
articles on the plant in 1905 and 1918. In the latter article he notes:
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- "The principal importance of Ka
he'e (stevia) is due to the possibility of substituting it for saccharine.
It presents these great advantages over saccharine:
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- 1. It is not toxic but, on the contrary,
it is healthful, as shown by long experience and according to the studies
of Dr. Rebaudi. 2. It is a sweetening agent of great power. 3. It can be
employed directly in its natural state, (pulverized leaves). 4. It is much
cheaper than saccharine."
-
- Unfortunately, this last point may have
been the undoing of stevia. Noncaloric sweeteners are a big business in
the U.S., as are caloric sweeteners like sugar and the sugar-alcohols,
sorbital, mannitol and xylitol. It is small wonder that the powerful sweetener
interests here, do not want the natural, inexpensive, and non-patentable
stevia approved in the U.S. In the 1970s, the Japanese government approved
the plant, and food manufacturers began using stevia extracts to sweeten
everything from sweet soy sauce and pickles to diet Coke. Researchers
found the extract interesting, resulting in dozens of well-designed studies
of its safety, chemistry and stability for use in different food products.
Various writers have praised the taste of the extracts, which has much
less of the bitter aftertaste prevalent in most noncaloric sweeteners.
In addition to Japan, other governments have approved stevia and stevioside,
including those of Brazil, China and South Korea, among others. Unfortunately,
the US was destined to be a different story. Stevia has been safely used
in this country for over ten years, but a few years ago, the trouble began.
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- FDA ATTACK ON STEVIA
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- Around 1987, FDA inspectors began visiting
herb companies who were selling stevia, telling them to stop using it because
it is an "unapproved food additive". By mid 1990 several companies
had been visited. In one case FDA's inspector reportedly told a company
president they were trying to get people to stop using stevia "because
Nutra Sweet complained to FDA." The Herb Research Foundation(HRF),
which has extensive scientific files on stevia, became concerned and filed
a Freedom of Information Act request with FDA for information about contacts
between Nutra Sweet and FDA about stevia. It took over a year to get any
information from the FDA, but the identity of the company who prompted
the FDA action was masked by the agency.
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- In May, 1991 FDA acted by imposing an
import alert on stevia to prevent it from being imported into the US.
They also began formally warning companies to stop using the "illegal"
herb. By the beginning of 1991, the American Herbal Products Association
(AHPA) was working to defend stevia. At their general meeting at Natural
Products Expo West, members of the industry pledged most of the needed
funds to support work to convince FDA of the safety of stevia. AHPA contracted
HRF to produce a professional review of the stevia literature. The review
was conducted by Doug Kinghorn, PhD., one of the world's leading authorities
on stevia and other natural non-nutritive sweeteners. Dr. Kinghorn's report
was peer-reviewed by several other plant safety experts and concluded that
historical and current common use of stevia, and the scientific evidence
all support the safety of this plant for use in foods. Based on this report,
and other evidence, AHPA filed a petition with FDA in late October asking
FDA's "acquiescence and concurrence" that stevia leaf is exempt
from food additive regulations and can be used in foods.
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- FDA, apparently attempting to regulate
this herb as they would a new food additive, contends that there is inadequate
evidence to approve stevia. However, because of its use in Japan, there
is much more scientific evidence of stevia's safety than for most foods
and additives. The extent of evidence FDA is demanding for the approval
of stevia, far exceeds that which has been required to approve even new
synthetic food chemicals like aspartame (Nutra Sweet).
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- AHPA's petition points out that FDA's
food additive laws were meant to protect consumers from synthetic chemicals
added to food. FDA is trying, in the case of stevia to claim that stevia
is the same as a chemical food additive. But as the AHPA petition points
out, Congress did not intend food additive legislation to regulate natural
constituents of food itself. In fact, Congressman Delaney said in 1956,
"There is hardly a food sold in the market today which has not had
some chemicals used on or in it at some stage in its production, processing,
packaging, transportation or storage." He stressed that his proposed
bill was to assure the safety of "new chemicals that are being used
in our daily food supply," and when asked if the regulations would
apply to whole foods, he replied "No, to food chemicals only."
AHPA contends that stevia is a food, which is already recognized as
safe because of its long history of food use. Foods which have a long history
of safe use are exempted by law from the extensive laboratory tests required
of new food chemicals. The AHPA petition, however, supports the safe use
of stevia with both the historical record, and references to the numerous
toxicology studies conducted during the approval process in Japan, and
studies by interested researchers in other countries.
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- To date, the FDA still refuses to allow
stevia to be sold in the U.S. but the recently-enacted Dietary Supplement
Health and Education Act of 1994 may prevent the FDA from treating stevia
and other natural herbs as "food additives."
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- rmccaleb@herbs.org -- [also herbal@netcom.com]
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