Sour notes on a new craze: SUGAR, THE NEXT DIET DEMON / Consumers are beating a path to grocers' shelves that groanunder the weight of low-sugar goods. But experts question the wisdom of eating more chemical sweeteners

Last summer, as the low-carbohydrate dieting craze began to fade, executives at Stonyfield Farms decided they had to make a change to their Moove Over Carbs yogurt.
What they came up with was simple and painless: In January, they pulled Moove Over Carbs from the shelves, and this month, Moove Over Sugar takes its place. Except for the name, the products are exactly the same -- sugars are, after all, also carbs. Both yogurts contain a sugar substitute and have at least 40-per-cent fewer calories than Stonyfield Farm's regular flavoured varieties.
Low-sugar has become the new low-carb.
Food makers are rushing to meet demand from consumers concerned with their waistlines and healthier eating by providing an array of new products, some of them aimed at children. But scientists are divided over how positive this development is, questioning whether the change will help people lose weight and how healthful the artificial sweeteners are.
According to a survey by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a U.S. industry trade group, almost 50 per cent of all grocery shoppers said they were looking for products with reduced sugar.
"Carbs was a trend, but the concern about sugar is here to stay," said Cathleen Toomey, vice-president of communications at Stonyfield Farms, which is owned by Groupe Danone of France.
Just about every major food company is thinking along these lines. Among the new products being offered are Pepperidge Farm Sugar Free Milano cookies and General Mills 75% Less Sugar Cocoa Puffs.
Supermarkets blitzed by
sugarless or low-sugar products
Propelled in part by the popularity of the sugar substitute sucralose, or Splenda, the food industry last year introduced 2,225 sugarless or sugar-reduced products in the United States, the research firm Productscan Online reported. This figure is more than double that of two years ago and represents 11 per cent of all new products in 2004.
By contrast, in 2004, the height of the low-carb boom, 3,375 products were introduced, accounting for 19 per cent of all new products that year, Productscan reported. This year, low-carb product introductions from January through April were down 25 per cent from the same period last year.
Earlier this month, ACNielsen identified organic and low or no sugar as the two "good for you" food segments that will get products noticed by consumers and generate the strongest sales growth. Many of these new low-sugar products are not just the old standbys like diet sodas and sugarless gum, but foods and drinks like cereals, fruit juices, cookies, bread, ice cream, pasta sauce, maple syrup and even bottled water.
A few of these products, like Kellogg's One-Third Less Sugar Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes cereals, and Mott's Healthy Harvest apple sauce, simply have less added sugar and taste less sweet. But most are made with one or more of the half-dozen no-calorie artificial sweeteners on the market and are designed to taste much like the original.
While many nutritionists champion artificial sweeteners as a way to cut calories and reduce sugar, others say these products are not the answer to North America's weight and health problems. Some critics voice concern about the increased consumption of what are essentially chemical sweeteners, especially among children. New low-sugar products -- like breakfast cereal and fruit juice sweetened with Splenda and vanilla milk with neotame, a new intensely sweet sugar replacement -- are consumed heavily by children.
Dr. Susan Schiffman, a sweetener specialist and professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center, says she has safety concerns about sucralose, which is the fastest-growing sugar replacement. She points to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 1998 report giving approval for sucralose, which said the compound is "weakly mutagenic in a mouse lymphoma mutation assay," meaning it caused minor genetic damages in mouse cells.
The report also said one of the substances produced when sucralose is broken down in the body is "weakly mutagenic in the Ames test." An Ames test is used to detect possible carcinogens.
"The sucralose people keep saying, 'It's just a little bit of a mutagen,' " Schiffman said. "Well, I don't want a little bit of a mutagen in my food supply. How do you know what happens in a long life span or to the next generation or to your eggs and sperm?"
McNeil Nutritionals, a division of Johnson & Johnson that sells Splenda, says the safety of sucralose has been confirmed in more than 100 studies over the last 20 years, and it has been approved for use by regulatory agencies around the world. Over the years, sweeteners like saccharin and aspartame have also prompted safety concerns.
Other critics of artificial sweeteners focus their concerns on whether these foods and beverages actually help people lose weight or improve their diets. According to a consumer survey done last year by the Calorie Control Council, a trade group representing the low-calorie and reduced-fat food and beverage industry, people use sugar-reduced products primarily to "stay in overall better health" and "reduce calories."
Dr. Stuart Fischer, who worked for nine years with the low-carb diet specialist Dr. Robert Atkins and now runs his own nutrition practice in Manhattan, contends artificial sweeteners do nothing for a person's "overall health" because they perpetuate cravings for sweet foods.
"They remind dieters about the taste of the forbidden fruit," Fischer said. "Does Alcoholics Anonymous recommend alcohol-free beer? Of course not."
Fischer said he counsels patients to cut out all sweet foods from their diet to eliminate sugar cravings, which he says can lay the groundwork for Type 2 diabetes.
Dr. David Katz, a nutrition specialist and professor of public health at the Yale University School of Medicine, says that in his 15 years of treating patients he has observed that people who consume a lot of artificially sweetened foods also end up eating an excess of foods loaded with regular sugar, negating any savings in calories. "If you're exposed to sweet foods and drinks often, the threshold for satisfaction goes up," Katz said.
As in many areas of science, research findings on the issue are mixed. While some studies, like one done last year at Purdue University, support the ideas of people like Katz and Fischer, other, longer-term research has shown people who consume artificially sweetened, no-calorie beverages do lose more weight than those drinking regular, full-calorie sodas.
Yet almost all of these studies have looked at zero-calorie diet drinks, not low-sugar foods like Sugar Free Milano cookies and 50% Less Sugar Quaker Instant Oatmeal, which still have calories.
Some of these products, in fact, have as many calories as the original, making things confusing for the consumer. According to information displayed on box labels, One-Third Less Sugar Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops, 75% Less Sugar Cocoa Puffs and Trix, and 50% Less Sugar Fruity Pebbles cereals are not significantly lower in calories than the original versions. Neither are Sugar-Free Milanos.
Christine Homsey, a senior research food scientist at Food Perspectives, a consulting firm in Plymouth, Minn., explained that because sugar provides bulk, manufacturers add more flour or other grains to make up for the loss, putting calories back in.
In March, a woman in San Diego who said she thought the reduced-sugar cereals she bought for her children were lower in calories sued Kellogg, General Mills and Kraft Foods, saying the companies used misleading marketing.
The confusion over calorie counts and whether sugar-free foods will really help individuals lose weight has not deterred consumers from buying $1-billion worth of low-sugar products in the last year. According to ACNielsen LabelTrends, sales of ready-to-eat, less-sugar cereal jumped 63 per cent in the last 52 weeks, and revenue from the expanding universe of all low-sugar products is up 133 per cent from a year ago.
Eager to meet this growing demand, food companies are working furiously to devise even better ways of replicating the taste and function of sugar in food. All current sugar substitutes have aftertastes and other flaws that distinguish them from sugar, food scientists say. Many food specialists attribute Splenda's runaway success to its sugarlike taste, but they say that it, too, falls short.
"The Holy Grail remains elusive," said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist who has worked for food manufacturers like Pillsbury and Interstate Bakeries. "The perfect sweetener would be something that looks like sugar and acts like sugar in every way, except when you metabolize it."
Despite the concerns of some scientists and doctors about artificial sweeteners, the trend of low-sugar foods and beverages shows no signs of slowing down.
Katherine Tallmadge, a registered dietician in Washington, said she did not encourage her patients to use artificial sweeteners, but some do anyway. "People are hooked on sweets, and they want to eat sweet foods without the calories," she said. "It's a classic case of wanting your cake and eating it too."


PUBLICATION: The London Free Press
DATE: 2005.05.22
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Opinion Pages
PAGE: 17
COLUMN: Our view