CHEMICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL STUDIES ON NATURAL SWEETENERS FROM STEVIA PLANT

Abstract

Nonnutritive sweeteners, are compounds that provide sweet taste for food and beverages avoiding the calories. Due to ban of some artificial sweeteners on the basis that it is a human carcinogen. It has been essentially to the toxicological safeness and excessive sugar consumption, natural sweeteners have met with growing interest. In Egypt, there is a great interest on the strategical plan for the cultivation of a new crop used as source of natural sweeteners. Some trials for stevia plant cultivation just has been started in Egypt. Therefore, this investigation aimed to evaluate

this new sweetener crop through characterization of its chemical composition of this plant during it's growth period, extraction the sweeteners compound purification, identification, chemical structure study, physical properties, evaluation the sweetness intensity of these compounds and it's uses in some foods and beverages. The results obtained from this study can be summarized in the following points:

* The data of chemical composition of the stevia plant during growth stage • showed that there is changes in proximate composition especially for carbohydrate content• which increased to reach the highest level (58.17%) of dry leaves at 4 months of growth period then decreased again to (53.67 and 50.36%) at 5 and 6 months of growth period. It can be concluded that the most suitable time for harvesting at 4 months as plant began blooming. * Highest amount of carbohydrate (57.91%) m stevia dry leaves were

obtained by drying the plant at sunshine time (29-31°C/5 hrs/day)

followed by drying in electric oven at 50°C (57.42%) while the lowest