The “natural” artificial sweetener

“Stevia” is the common name for rebaudioside A, an artifical, no-calorie sweetener that is extracted from the leaves of the stevia plant.  Long popular in Japan, the FDA deemed it safe for use in food and drink this past December — after years of lobbying from “large food and drink manufacturers” who sensed ” an eager audience for a sugar substitute perceived as healthier than the rest,” the NYT reports.

Stevia is gaining popularity, thanks in part to bloggers like The Fitnessista, who champions whole food eating but uses stevia in everything from homemade almond milk to coffee. But what, really, seperates it from Splenda? Neither are things your grandmother would recognize as food (one of Michael Pollan’s rules for eating).

More on the marketing of stevia from the NYT article…

Stevia has one distinct advantage over all the rest. Because it comes from a plant, marketers can call it a natural sweetener. And that allows companies that have invested millions in new stevia products to tap into two powerful markets at once: natural ingredients and low-calorie products. […]

Two of the biggest backers [of stevia], Cargill and Whole Earth Sweetener Company, earlier this year began rolling out packets of stevia-based sweeteners, called Truvia and PureVia respectively. The extract is in the companies’ drinks, too. Among the new stevia products marketed as naturally sweetened are Sprite Green from Coca-Cola and Trop50, from the PepsiCo subsidiary Tropicana. It’s essentially half water and half orange juice doctored with stevia.

To underline their natural claims, stevia products come packaged in green.