Politicians are not always the ones who come up with the solutions. Sometimes it is consumers' focus and signals to manufacturers that push for change. This is also the case in the food industry.
In some countries, consumer power matters because there are those who want to take the lead. Ignoring signals from consumers is a poor strategy where there is a good selection av producers competing for the favor of consumers. In Norway, we have in reality 3 actors who run grocery chains, where no one apparently has a particular focus on environmental protection beyond the recycling of packaging, which can be a good initiative, but alone it is unlikely to save the world.
No environmental assessments for food additives
In the EU it was earlier not permitted to carry out environmental assessments in connection with the risk assessment of food additives. Chemical sweeteners such as sucralose, aspartame, etc. is approved and considered by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to be safe for humans, as long as one stays below the daily intake limit.
Still, it can be said that no consideration has been given to the environmental effects of consumption of such synthetic substances. Although a substance is considered harmless to the human body, this does not necessarily mean that it is harmless, or without impact on fish, birds, plants and other life in nature.
Article 7 of the European Regulation on food additives (EC) No. 1333/2008 states that environmental factors should also be taken into account when approving food additives, but no mandatory investigations are required for industrial chemicals and their environmental impact is determined.
Representatives of 40 food producers at a workshop in Brazil
Brazilian consumers are turning their backs on synthetic sweeteners. Whether it is dangerous to health or not, it matters little when consumers have made up their minds.
Manufacturers of the sweetener sucralose convinced many that the sweetener was natural because it was made from sugar. So far a half-truth, but the whole truth is that the sweetener is a composition of sugar and chlorine in a covalent non-biodegradable chlorine bond. This means that the molecules cannot be broken down, neither in the body, nor in nature. That's because such bonds have never existed in nature.
Now the food manufacturers are following suit. After all, they depend on the customers who, of course, are the ones who decide what they want to buy, if there is a choice.
That is why almost 100 people from more than 40 food producers in Brazil are meeting at a workshop in Porto Alegre on 25 March. The organizer is an ice cream producer association that asked us for help so that their members would have a competitive advantage over the big producers in Brazil. The workshop was also opened to other food producers, but we have now had to close registration. The interest was so great that there was not room for everyone.
The ice cream makers learn how to make sugar-free ice cream with natural sweeteners
Many of those present have already tried our ice cream base, which contains everything a sugar-free ice cream must have, except the milk. The objections before testing were that many people get upset stomachs from sugar-free ice cream, but after testing they know that this problem does not arise when ice cream, sorbet and soft ice cream are made with our base.
Several producers of chocolate and nut spreads use JustSweet
Our natural sweetener that tastes like sugar can of course also be used in products other than ice cream. Some manufacturers have even decided not only to stop using artificial sweeteners, but also to stop using sugar.
8 consumers have clicked likes
713 have commented and 1 have shared our Facebook post which informs about what can happen if you do not reduce the consumption of artificial sweeteners such as sucralose. Our own research on this was published on Academia, at the request of the website used by more than 200 universities.
See our Facebook post below: