Natural sugar reduction: Spotlight on stevia’s health benefits, taste and sustainability

05 Apr 2024 --- As consumers continue their search for healthier food options with lower sugar content, we explore the benefits of natural stevia sweeteners in F&B formulations. Nutrition Insight sits down with two leading stevia suppliers, Ingredion and Cargill, to discuss associated health benefits, market trends and sustainability. 

Megan DeStefano, senior director of strategic growth at Ingredion, sees a strong demand for functional beverages, foods and snacks where the company supports its customers. “In particular, in our plant-based proteins, where we have a strong sustainability program and 100% sourced and manufactured in North America, our fiber portfolio and our stevia portfolio that supports sugar reduction.”

Meanwhile, Cargill’s product line manager for high-intensity sweeteners, Alyssa Leyva, also sees an increased focus on customized nutrition and health delivery options, many of which “are looking for options to reduce sugar and offer lower caloric choices.” 

She underscores stevia’s potential to address specific dietary needs: “Some people are following specific diets like keto or others are just looking for a healthier diet — reducing calories and sugars is important to them.”

Sugar reduction soars 
Stevia innovation is critical to improving taste, highlights DeStefano. This is important because consumers want stevia’s health benefits and look for products with a great taste. 

“About half of consumers are seeking to reduce sugar. It’s the number one ingredient they’re trying to reduce in their diet,” she adds. “We expect that trend to continue.”

“One of the things that’s important is the consumer eating experience. They want reduced sugar, but if it doesn’t taste great in terms of flavor, sweetness or texture, they won’t return to the shelf. And we want our customers to have repeat purchases.”

DeStefano highlights the importance of stevia taste for consumers to make repeat purchases.DeStefano explains that Ingredion invests in innovation to ensure its stevia solutions have a great taste and work in more applications so that its customers can reduce or even eliminate sugar. 

“We want to bring more sugar reduction naturally to things like beverages, snacks, sauces and dressings. There’s a lot of hidden sugar in those that consumers want to start addressing. It takes a lot of technology to get the right products out and manufacture them appropriately at scale so that we can put them in large-scale products on the shelf for consumers, and they still taste great.” 

Gut impact 
To evaluate stevia’s impact on the gut, Cargill recently conducted a study that found the sweetener was well tolerated by study participants, had no significant effects on the relative abundance of gut microflora and did not significantly affect the microbial production of short-chain fatty acids. 

This study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, tracked the effect on the gut microbiome of daily consumption of a beverage sweetened with 25% of the acceptable daily intake of stevia or 30 g of sucrose for four weeks, followed by a four-week washout. 

The researchers monitored the gut microbiome of the 59 participants at baseline, weeks four and eight. 

Amid an ongoing debate on the safety and weight loss benefits of sweeteners, especially synthetic options, Leyva details that Cargill is increasingly looking into the health benefits of stevia, as there have been many years of research on its safety. “In a recent study, we have looked at appetite, food intake, as well as blood glucose.”

This study found that stevia-sweetened beverages and water did not impact blood glucose levels, while caloric-sweetened beverages — sucrose, glucose and maltodextrin — did raise blood glucose levels. Participants consumed these beverages 30 minutes pre-meal. 

“The subjects that had consumed the beverages sweetened with stevia reported that they had less hunger before the meal and less hunger than [after drinking] water.”

“Upon eating the meal, the subjects that had consumed the stevia-sweetened beverage consumed 105 calories less than those that had consumed water or any of the other sweetened beverages.”

At the recent Natural Products Expo West, Cargill’s Leyva detailed the latest research on the company’s stevia.Sustainable stevia 
Both Ingredion and Cargill firmly commit to sustainability in their stevia products. 

Ingredion’s PureCircle stevia solution offers 100% traceability, understanding the supply chain from the seedling to the end product. 

“That is important from an environmental perspective, but we’re also focused on worker ethics and safety,” comments DeStefano. “All our farmers are contracted and sign a code of ethics, and we are stringent in auditing them, both from the Ingredion perspective and from a third party perspective.” 

She adds that the company’s patents in stevia have allowed Ingredion to use more of the plant and reduce waste, thus improving the sustainability of its products. “We published the first ever life cycle analysis (LCA) of its kind in 2022. That shows how, as we innovate with stevia, it allows us to use more of that leaf.”

Leyva highlights Cargill’s sustainability program for its leaf-based sweeteners, which are fully traceable. The company’s latest fermentation-based sweetener, EverSweet, allows it to deliver sizable quantities sustainably and economically. “We just received a positive EFSA opinion for the EU, so we expect EverSweet to be approved in 2024.” 

“We’ve recently completed our second LCA with EverSweet, and we’re using the product environmental footprint impact methodology. We also did a 1044 ISO third-party panel review, and that methodology is really important because it enables us to meet EU standards.”

She details that the LCA is crucial for its customers who are committed to sustainability metrics. 

By Jolanda van Hal