Positive Liberty

Most Americans have never heard of stevia.

Most Japanese and Koreans eat it all the time.

Stevia is an herb that contains a natural sweetener. The active component is called stevioside; it has no calories and is about 300 times as sweet as sugar. It withstands high heat, dissolves readily in cold water, and its shelf-life is nigh on forever. Numerous studies have shown its safety, and yet the FDA has worked hard to keep stevia out of American products.

Only one loophole permits stevia into the country at all: Under our absurd food additive laws, stevia can be sold as a “dietary supplement,” provided no one ever markets it for any specific purpose. Thus the plant and extract are both available in health-food stores, most of whom take great pains to hide the fact that stevia is, in fact, sweet. You can usually find it on the shelf next to the ephedra… oh, wait. Given how the dietary supplements market is looking lately, you never know.

But if stevia is safe, why aren’t we eating more of it? An unholy alliance of crony capitalists and misguided consumer activists is keeping stevia from anything like a proper hearing in the free market.

Let’s start with the usual suspects. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has issued the following statement:

Stevia, a plant-based sweetener that has created a buzz in the health-food world, may pose risks to health and should not be allowed in the food supply…

Although there is no evidence of harm to people, laboratory studies of stevia have found potential cancer and reproductive-health problems. Stevia depressed sperm production in male rats and reduced the number and size of the offspring of female hamsters.

Several studies have also raised concerns about the effect of very large amounts of stevia on carbohydrate metabolism. And that troubles some toxicologists.

The Libertarian in me cringes. The Utilitarian does some figuring.

Although there is “no evidence” of harm to people, “large amounts” of stevia may have troubling effects. What about the large amounts of sugar that we now consume? Sugar causes “troubling effects” like obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, and a whole host of related problems. These problems not hypothetical; they are real and there is real evidence for them, as opposed to no real evidence against stevia.

The health problems of sugar have nothing to do with hamsters and everything to do with actual people who might want or even need an alternative to sugar, aspartame, and saccharin. Now, if you voluntarily choose to suffer from the health problems associated with sugar, then that is your business. But if you don’t want these problems–and you would rather take your chances on stevia–well, the FDA doesn’t want you doing it.

Similarly, the concerns about eating large quantities of stevia are, um, largely an illusion. Stevia is so SO sweet that no one will ever want to eat “large amounts” of it, certainly not on a daily basis. I know this because I own a concentrated bottle of stevia extract. An amount the size of a BB will make a cup of coffee more sweet than could a teaspoon of sugar. I’ve almost entirely stopped using the stuff because portion control is such a problem. It’s too sweet by far for everyday home use. Commercially, though, this wouldn’t be a problem at all, as stevioside could come pre-mixed in foods and beverages at exactly the proper level for most tastes.

If it were only the CSPI who wanted to ban stevia, the plant might still have a chance; after all, the CSPI wants to ban everything. Now come the crony capitalists. Monsanto makes aspartame, an artificial sweetner that has some serious problems of its own. Monsanto has spent a lot of money on aspartame; clearly they do have the right to reap whatever fruit their labor might yield. But they are worried, because stevia tastes better than aspartame and has fewer associated health problems (remember those scary warnings about phenylketonurics?). Worse, Monsanto can’t make much money on stevioside: No one can patent a natural chemical, and stevia is very easy to grow and refine.

So the company has pressured the FDA to prohibit stevia as a sweetener. In doing so, they have plunged headfirst into the realm of crony capitalism–the evil twin of free-market capitalism. In a real free market, a business wouldn’t be able to use its government ties to wreck the competition.

With both “industry” and “consumer” groups coming out against it, the poor herb doesn’t stand a chance. How bad does it get? Follow the link I gave above and you’ll see that the FDA even resorted to book-burnings. And over what?

Like I said, I own a bottle of stevia extract. The taste is a little different, but to my palate it’s a great deal more pleasant than either Splenda or NutraSweet (Incidentally, are these not both rather badly named? By their own admission, they are not “nutritious,” and I’d be willing to argue about “splendid,” too). My partner Scott notes that aspartame, the active ingredient in NutraSweet, always gives him a headache. I’ve noticed the same thing from time to time, but stevia gives no headaches.

What about those poor, sick little hamsters? Well, it turns out that if you feed hamsters pure stevioside at doses of 500mg/Kg, 1000mg/Kg, and 2500mg/Kg, nothing at all happens!

To duplicate these amazingly high doses, I would have to eat 40 grams, 80 grams, or 200 grams of pure stevioside every single day. The above study notes that typical human consumption is 2 milligrams of stevioside per dose. Interestingly, my entire bottle of stevia extract contains only 28 grams; I would have to eat it and several others every single day if I wanted to duplicate these dose levels. In other words, this study of stevioside gave absolutely the opposite results of what the Center for Science in the Public Interest claimed. Overdose would be nearly impossible. The study’s conclusions included the following:

The study showed no significant difference in the average growth of the first generation of hamsters in the groups receiving stevioside — no matter what dosage they were given. Even the third generation of hamsters, at 120 days of age, showed no significant differences in body weight — no matter which group they were in.
As to the mating performance, all three generations performed the same, no matter which dose of stevioside they received. Their performance was equal to the controls.

So where did the CSPI get those poor sick hamsters in the first place? It turns out that they were quoting a different study, one that did not use any stevioside. Instead, it used extremely high doses of steviol, another chemical that may or may not even be produced at all by stevia metabolism.

In other words, you would have to consume colossal doses of stevioside to have anything even remotely like a possible potential for creating that much steviol in your body–And there is no evidence at all that the body metabolizes the one into the other. Finally, the long history of safe stevia use in Japan, Korea, and South America suggests that no such danger exists in reality. It’s even been used in the Japanese version of Diet Coke.

But we can never be too careful. Let’s listen to the CSPI:

To stevia’s boosters, there’s no debate. The herb has been consumed without apparent harm in different parts of the world for many years, they argue. No reports of any adverse reactions have surfaced after 30 years of use in Japan, for instance.
“But the Japanese don’t consume large amounts of stevia,” notes Douglas Kinghorn, professor of pharmacognosy (the study of drugs from plants) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“In the U.S., we like to go to extremes,” adds toxicologist Ryan Huxtable of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “So a significant number of people here might consume much greater amounts.”

In the U.S., we like to go to extremes. No kidding. I can just see the frat parties now…

“Hey man, how much stevia can you pound?”