A rose, as Shakespeare said, by any other name would smell as sweet. But suppose we took that same rose and applied our best food engineers to it and extracted a chemical molecule that we then branded as RoseBloom Natural Sweetener—would it taste as sweet?
That, as Shakespeare said in another play and in a different context, is the question.
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Back in the old days, sweetness was determined by the amount of natural ingredients one added to a drink or food. And there weren’t a lot of options. There was sugar cane juice, first extracted in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago. And eventually people learned to make sugar granules from that same juice.
Years later, there was the sugar beet, which owes its popularity to Napoleon Bonaparte.
There was also honey, which people have harvested for roughly 8,000 years.
And that was about it, except for some variations (molasses, created in the early stages of sugar refining, from grapes, for example) until Eisenhower was president.
A couple of scientists invented high-fructose corn syrup in 1957. But it was researchers in Japan who perfected the process in the mid-1960s through 1970. Within just a few more years, HFCS had found its way into hundreds of processed foods and soft drinks.
In the following years, a number of other artificial sweeteners also made their way into the food chain—saccharine, aspartame, cyclamate (later banned in the U.S. as a cancer risk), stevia, etc.
The problem, of course, is not taste. Lots of people love the tastes of the new sweeteners. The problem is health. Artificial sweeteners have always been a source of concern among many doctors, consumer activists and regular folks.
Those concerns are growing. Consumers increasingly turn to alternatives to the better known alternatives. And the food industry is responding in a variety of ways.
Here’s a quick look at some of the more interesting developments that have come from the sweetener controversy from recent months.
COCA-COLA'S NEW PUSH
Coca-Cola launched an advertising campaign defending its use of aspartame (the sweetener commonly sold under the brand name NutraSweet.) Coca-Cola has the government on its side here. The Food and Drug Administration says aspartame, a synthesized chemical, is safe.
But Coke does not have time on its side, and the company knows it. Coca-Cola is also testing soda sweetened with stevia, a sweetener derived from the stevia leaf.
STEVIA STRUGGLES ELSEWHERE
Stevia, in the meantime, is facing a public-relations crisis of its own, and only time will tell if stevia sweetener's Sunday night "Breaking Bad" appearance will add fuel to that fire.
Consumer activists have filed a number of lawsuits recently over what they see as the inappropriate use of the term “natural” when describing foods.
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Earlier this month Cargill, which markets stevia under the brand name Truvia, opted to settle one of those suits and to modify its claim and tagline.
Still, the market for stevia appears to be growing. Nearly half of Americans have a product made with stevia in the pantry.
And tobacco growers, who have suffered some p.r. headaches themselves in recent decades, are increasingly switching their operations to stevia production.
THE REST OF THE COMPETITION
New sweeteners, derived from foods, are all the rage these days. And these new sweeteners are coming from some very old-fashioned foods.
OatSweet, as you would guess, is derived from oats. In the proprietary method used by parent company Oat Tech, the soluable fiber is preserved. The result is a syrup that’s particularly well-suited for use in bars and ice cream.
Monk fruit is an Asian tree fruit that was popular with a group of 12th Century Buddhist monks. But cultivation of the fruit nearly disappeared in the ensuing centuries. Today the extract of monk fruit, which is some 300 times sweeter than sugar, is a growing presence on tabletops and in food processing. Tate & Lyle sells the stuff under the brand name Purefruit, while BioVittoria is pushing its own alternatives.
And that's not all. Honey and agave are also finding new fans among food processors, who look to answer consumers’ desires to move toward more genuine foods. Sweetening beverages with those items is common among soft-drink makers who produce low-calorie or mid-calorie drinks.
All of this back-to-the-old-days style of sweeteners is good news, of course, as long as no one decides to revive lead sugar.
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