"sweetener" news and stories

Somewhere around 25% of coffee drinkers in the US now prefer their coffee with a flavor, such as hazelnut or vanilla, and at least that many use calorie-free sweeteners in place of sugar on a regular basis. Splenda's new Flavor Blends for Coffee combine those concepts. They are packets of sweetener flavored to taste like French Vanilla, Hazelnut and Mocha, allowing consumers to "customize hot beverages at home or on the go with no calories."

The Flavor Blends only launched this week, so they might not be in stores in your area yet, but for fans of Splenda, they sound very promising. They will be ideal for using at the office, rather than going out to Starbucks for a high-calorie (and relatively high-cost) mocha. Their small size also allows them be tucked into a purse or coat pocket when traveling, but they will work well for regular home use, too.

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Piloncillo is an unrefined sugar that is commonly used in Mexican cooking. The sugar has been around for at least 500 years, and was being made before the Spanish came to Mexico around 1500. It is made when sugar canes are crushed, the juice is collected and boiled then poured into molds, where it hardens into blocks. The fact that it comes in block form is one of the reasons why white and brown sugars are more commonly used, even in Mexican cooking, than piloncillo once was. To use it, it must be grated or chiseled off the main block - a process which is well worth the resulting flavor boost in food to some, but too time consuming for others to bother.

Unlike white sugar, which is flat and one-dimensional in its sweet flavor, piloncillo is smoky, caramely and earthy. It has far more flavor than brown sugar, which is generally just white sugar with a small amount of molasses added back to it. It can be uses in moles and other sauces, as well as to simple sweeten coffee or top off buttery toast. In most applications, it must be melted down to be incorporated into recipes. You can find piloncillo in many Mexican or Latin American grocery stores or order it online.

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Stevia is not a sweetener that is approved for use by the FDA. It is actually classified as a dietary supplement, an herb, that happens to be sweeter than sugar and can be - and is - used as a sweetener. It is all natural, has no calories (or carbs) and is getting more and more popular, though it makes up only a small portion of the non-sugar sweetener market.

Its popularity is due to an increased awareness for the product, thanks to well-placed advertisements and hard work on the part of the SweetLeaf Stevia brand's LA marketing firm, which has made sure that high end restaurants and even stores carry the product, prompting even more coverage from newspapers and magazines.

The only problem with Stevia, according to both the manufacturers and consumers, is that it is still hard to find. Not all stores carry it. Some stores, like Trader Joe's, try to make the product easily visible, but because it is an herb, it is often stocked in the supplements aisle in other stores, not in the section of the market with the sugars and sweeteners. Clearly this is not a huge setback, however, because the sales of the sweetener are steadily increasing. In the last year alone, they have increased almost 40%, though overall sales are only one tenth of the sales of Splenda, the top selling non-sugar sweetener.

If the interest in the product keeps growing at this rate - and it seems likely to - we could see Stevia become more widely available and used in more packaged products in place of artificial sugars.

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High fructose corn syrup is something that we commonly hear we should avoid. When we ask why, we're told that it's bad for us. But is it really that bad? The New York Times takes a look at that question by going straight to the source and talking to the scientists who put out some of the first research linking HFCS to obesity, as well as many other members of the scientific and medical community.

Basically, the upshot of all this hype is that high fructose corn syrup isn't that bad - certainly no worse than other forms sugar. In fact, it is only high in fructose when compared to regular corn syrup and actually has less than table sugar. This doesn't mean that the medical community isn't saying it is health food, but experts like Dr. Walter Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health, say '"There's no substantial evidence to support the idea that high-fructose corn syrup is somehow responsible for obesity," and seem to believe that we would still have an obesity problem if all the HFCS in food disappeared overnight.

More recent medical studies, instead of focusing on HFCS specifically, have looked at products that have added sugar in any form and recommend that they all be consumed minimally, whether the sweetener comes from corn, cane, beet or other sources.

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Millions of people drink aspartame each day in their diet sodas and other sugar-free foods, though there are many other sweetener options to choose from. The brand name artificial sweeteners made with aspartame include Equal and Nutra-Sweet. In the past, study results have suggested that there might be a link between aspartame consumption and increased risk of some types of cancer, particularly when aspartame consumption was unusually high. Virtually all of these previous studies were in groups of rats, not people, and the amount of aspartame given to rats was up to several times their body weight - a feat which might be physically impossibly to do via diet cola consumption.

A new federal study has looked at people, not rodents, and shows that there was no increased cancer risk from aspartame consumption. The researchers in the study looked at over 500,000 American diets to draw their conclusions. The study has been praised by consumer groups and was presented to the American Association of Cancer research earlier this week. (Our sister blog - The Cancer Blog - is also talking about this study.)

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