YOU ASKED: I have heard that in the U.S. there is a sweetener from a plant. I heard that the Canadian government is still testing it. Is it likely to come to our markets anytime soon?

— Tina

OUR ANSWER: Stevia is likely the sweetener you are referring to. It’s a zero-calorie natural sweetener that comes from the leaves of the stevia plant, native to Paraguay and Brazil.

Stevia (pronounced: steh-vee-ah) has been used as a sweetener for centuries in South America and as an approved sweetening agent in Japan since 1970; in fact, it comprises about 40 per cent of the sweetener market in Japan.

But here in Canada it’s a different story.

You can walk into Nature’s Fare Market in Kamloops and buy stevia for personal culinary use, but you can’t buy any commercial foods containing stevia. Health Canada hasn’t approved it as a food additive.

In other words, you can sprinkle stevia on your morning cereal but you can’t buy cereals containing stevia.

But Health Canada has approved stevia as a non-medicinal sweetener in 105 natural health products and as a medicinal ingredient in three natural health products.

We asked the federal regulator why stevia-containing foods can’t be sold in Canada and we were told that stevia is still undergoing a rigorous safety evaluation as a food additive, and that it would “continue to be considered as non-permitted” until it passes that evaluation.

So, stevia remains an approved natural health product but an unapproved food-additive product.