IT'S BEEN hailed as the health food holy grail - a natural sugar substitute that tastes good but won't rot your teeth or make you fat.
Up to 300 times sweeter than sugar but with zero calories, stevia is tipped to revolutionise the diet industry.
The World Health Organization says it is safe, predicting it will eventually replace up to 20 per cent of the global sugar supply and supersede artificial sweeteners. But is this natural sweetener, extracted from the leaves of the South American Stevia rebaudiana plant, the panacea for our obesity epidemic and a guilt-free way to eat what we like? Or is it just slick marketing from a food and beverage industry pandering to increasingly health-conscious consumers?
While stevia is up to 10 times more expensive than sugar, nutritionist Rosemary Stanton told The Sunday Age its rising popularity is partly driven by misguided fear of sugar, which has been demonised by some commentators as a ''poison'' as harmful as alcohol or tobacco.
Dr Stanton warned that substituting sugar with stevia might not reduce our expanding waistlines.
''There's not much point putting a healthier sweetener into a really fatty dessert or in doughnuts, because it's still going to be nutritionally disastrous. If it [stevia] makes junk food seem OK then that to me is the greatest problem it has,'' she said. ''If you're going to make jam or cakes or biscuits, you need the bulk of sugar as well as its sweetness, and because some of these concentrated sweetener products don't have the bulkiness, they've got to use a horribly highly refined starch, which has the same calories as sugar anyway so they're not better off.''
Since Diet Coke was launched using the artificial sweetener aspartame in 1982, the global sweetener market has grown to be worth more than $60 billion a year.
But health scares linking man-made sweeteners to adverse effects, including increased cancer risk - an association since proven to be flawed - have left many consumers looking for ''safe'' alternatives.
Used by South American tribes for centuries, and commercially available in Japan since the 1970s, stevia, a shrub from the chrysanthemum family, has been shown in preliminary studies to help diabetics balance blood sugar levels and in preliminary studies to help diabetics balance blood sugar levels and lower blood pressure.
It is sold as a tabletop sweetener in granule, liquid and tablet form and is being used increasingly in processed foods and soft drinks.
The healthy reputation of stevia has led to it overtaking aspartame, used in popular brands NutraSweet and Equal, within a year of launching in the United States in 2008.
Approved in Australia the same year, stevia is not used as widely here. But as a weight-conscious nation looks to cut calories, the market is rapidly growing, and suppliers and scientists say it could really take off if the stevia plant, currently imported from China and the US, is grown and processed here.
They say cultivating a domestic stevia crop could also improve quality, countering complaints that some poorer quality imported stevia can leave a bitter, liquorice-like aftertaste.
In a report commissioned by the federal government's Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and released this month, David Midmore, director of the Centre for Plant and Water Science at Central Queensland University, estimates the potential Australian stevia market could be worth up to $40 million a year.
He said coastal Queensland and New South Wales would have the best conditions for stevia crops, although parts of Victoria might also be suitable.
''The benefits of stevia are manifold. Compared to artificial sweeteners, natural sweeteners can be used in organic foods, and stevia is reasonably heat-stable, so it can be used in the manufacture of cakes and biscuits, and if used only for sweetening purposes any sweeteners can reduce sugar intake and therefore reduce the likelihood of development of type 2 diabetes,'' said Professor Midmore, whose research is partly funded by food giant Sanitarium, which uses stevia in its Up&Go Vive liquid breakfast range.
David Mackinnon, from Xlear Australia, imports stevia and sells it under the brand name Naturally Sweet in more than 900 health food stores.
''The way it's being described in the industry, stevia is the holy grail of sweeteners and I'd bet money on it overtaking artificial sweeteners,'' he said.
''You can produce it for the same price as artificial and it has about 98 per cent of the capabilities of sugar. I think we have to start producing it here because we've got the climate for it and demand locally is only going to increase.''
Tabletop sweeteners for coffee and tea is stevia's biggest growth area, with Hermesetas and Equal among the traditional artificial sweetener brands now selling stevia-based products in Australia. Soft drinks are the other expanding category, with Coca-Cola and Schweppes launching ''healthy'' stevia-based mineral waters. Overseas, many soft drinks and juices are being reformulated using it.
But Geoff Parker, chief executive of the Australian Beverages Council, said that although the products are part of a growing category they still represent less than 1 per cent of the Australian drink market. ''It's not simply a case of taking sugar out and putting stevia in. There's a whole range of formulation issues about the taste and the mouth feel, so products with stevia can tend to have a bigger feeling in the mouth, slightly heavy,'' he said.
Nutritionists also warn that fizzy soft drinks using stevia instead of sugar may not be good for dental health if the products still contain additives such as citric and phosphoric acid, which can erode teeth enamel and hinder calcium absorption.
Problems with aftertaste have led to a rise of ''blended'' products mixing stevia with other natural sweeteners such as xylitol, which comes from birch tree bark and corn cobs, or erythritol, found in berries.
Sugar companies are also cashing in, with CSR producing a brand called Smart, a stevia-sugar blend spruiked as a lower calorie option with the same taste and texture of sugar.
Russell Abotomey, general manager of Sugar Australia, said it was a growth area but still a small market. CSR's Smart sells 200 tonnes a year through Australian supermarkets compared with 117,000 tonnes for the wider sugar category. Mr Abotomey said nothing would ever completely replace sugar in our food supply and blaming it for rising health problems was misguided.
''If we look at the Australian market over the last 30 years, sugar consumption has declined by 20 per cent but obesity levels have continued to grow, so it's too simplistic to say people are becoming obese because of just food intake.''
Price may also be a barrier to stevia's expansion. Mr Mackinnon from Xlear Australia said he sells the natural sweetener for about $33 a kilogram, although stevia is more intense than sugar so less is required.
Rosemary Stanton said the food and beverage industries might not be in a rush to switch to natural sweeteners because using high levels of sugar is a cheap way to bulk out food like cereals.
''If they insist on having sweetened breakfast cereals it would be good if they had stevia in them if that meant they could have more grain. But if they did replace sugar with stevia plus these highly refined starches then there's nothing to be gained,'' she said.
''It's like when the food industry came up with low-fat foods where they just replaced the fat with either sugar or one of these contrived starches, which was totally and utterly useless or in fact worse than useless because people thought if it said low-fat they could eat twice as much.''
source: theage
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