Sugar has become a largely villainized food additive, and as consumers look for an alternative route to satisfy their sweet tooth, the non-calorie sweetener stevia has been making its way onto the market for some time now.
But it wasn’t without drawbacks because the plant derived “candy leaf” came with a bitter aftertaste. Recently, however, food scientists at Cornell’s International Crops and Weed Garden discovered the part of stevia that stimulates the bitter receptors on the surface of the human tongue. Their findings, published in the journalFood Chemistry, revealed a way to improve the sugar replacement’s one bitter tasting drawback.
“The food industry constantly evaluates and uses several alternate high-intensity sweeteners to duplicate the taste of sugar, usually with no calories,” said study lead Samriddh Mudgal, a researcher at Cornell’s plantation. “Growing demand for natural ingredients have led to the rising popularity of steviol glycosides, which are natural sweeteners extracted from stevia leaves. They’ve been in use for centuries in South America.”
Previous research has focused on trying to mask the bitter taste, but Mudgal and his research team targeted rebaudioside A, known as “Reb A.” It’s the component that tantalizes the tongues sweet receptors but also some bitterness that experts believe was limiting stevia’s commercial potential. Instead of using chemicals, scientists just modified Reb A enough to make it unrecognizable to the human tongue’s bitter receptors. They tested the newly engineered stevia in orange juice and were pleased to taste only sweetness and none of the bitterness it used to activate on the tongue.
Stevia’s full name “stevia rebaudiana” is a leafy green plant found in Paraguay and Brazil, and has been used not only as a sweetening agent, but also in traditional medicine as a treatment for burns, colic, stomach problems, and contraceptive. The part of the plant that makes it sweet is steviol glycosides, and although it's 200 times sweeter than sugar, it doesn’t cause a spike in a person’s blood sugar levels, making it an attractive, natural sweetener for diabetics and other people who have carb-controlled diets. For that reason, the research team believes the beverage industry, along with dressings, sauces, soup, and dairy manufacturers, may turn to stevia as the main sweetening agent in place of sugar.
Source: www.medicaldaily.com