Short Stuff: Olestra

your pants. Yeah. So this one starts back in the fifties. Uh, we can't talk about a lester without mentioning the Seven Country Study, which was very famous in the fifties for for fooling science and the world into the notion that fats are terrible they will kill you don't eat them. So all foods started saying, great, we're gonna put out no fat stuff and start pumping in high fruit dose corn syrup into our things to create flavor. And the

world is the worst for it. Right, Yeah, I think we need to do is a straight up stuff you should know episode about the seven the Seven Country Study. Okay for sure, So stop talking about it now. Okay. So the upshot of what you just said is that we live in we by I think the seventies or eighties, we lived in like a fat free obsessed society, right, and the manufacturers of food said, hey, sure, we'll we'll

give it to you. We'll do some of those amazing things that Chuck just mentioned, and um, we'll give you low fat food as much as you can take. And by the mid nineties, like the whole thing was at its peak. Man, like the you remember, um, healthy Choice.

I think Healthy Choice is still around. So they came out with a line of foods and in healthy Choice, just a healthy Choice line of food um made one point three billion dollars in sales, Like that's how much that People were like, here, take all my money, just give me some fat free foods because fat's gonna kill me and make me fat. And um, I hate fat. Don't you hate fat? Yes, because it's the word fat and you don't want to be that word right right.

Plus also, I think everybody was scared to death. We're all going to die of heart attacks if we ate like any fat whatsoever. So the solution was fat free foods and it was in full swing in the nineties. So Um, by this time, I believe it was Procter and Gamble that came up with the lestra right, Yeah, they came up with that. That's just their trade name for UH polyester sucros, and this was developed by them in the late sixties, but it took to the nineties

to really catch hold in full. And this is one of those where they it's not like they didn't do product research. They did a lot of testing and research, and they learned that Olestra would make you poop your pants, and they pressed on anyway UH and went forward knowing this, which it was an interesting decision to say the least. Yeah, like they were searching for a fat substitute for formula to to um feed premature infants. Yeah, which is a

eat start. It is a sweet start, and hopefully they realized very quickly that no infant should ever have polyester sucros passed through its mouth. It's probably hard to tell with babies, Yeah, that's true, UM, but it's not hard to tell with adults. And like you said, their their product testing showed there are some real problems with the lestra When you ate it, um, you would get abdominal cramping,

you would get flatulent, you would poop your pants. Like you said, there were a lot of things that came back that that were red flags and should have been to Procter and Gamble that that should have told them, like, don't put this into food products and then sell them to consumers, because this is going to be bad. But Procter and Gamble, it's spent you know, hundreds of millions of dollars developing this stuff by this time and being been in in development for like thirty years. And so

they said, nope, we're going to do this. We're going to go get the FDA to approve it. And the FDA said, okay, we'll give you approval, but you have to put a warning on any food item, like the container of any food item that you sell this stuff in. Yeah, and that that label I remember seeing it. It literally said it could cause abdom a, dominal cramping and loose stools. Uh. They were marketed um for their line for like pringles in and free lay as wow. Uh all upper case

exclamation point. And despite the fact that it said on the label like, hey, this will give you diarrhea, people are like, well, I get that, but can I eat a whole bag of chips and not have any fat? And the label said sure? And I think that was I think that actually increased the diarrhea and the cramping was the fact that people probably overindulged even because they could. Yeah, and so we should probably talk real quick about the

science behind this, right, Yeah, let's do it. So um, polyester sucros mimics fat and its taste, its mouth feel, it does everything that fat does except get metabolized by body. Right, So, like A like a triglystrite, and naturally occurring fat is A is a molecule fatty acids surrounded by three chains of hydrocarbons. And when you eat that thing, that molecule UM, your body metabolizes it by breaking the hydrocarbon chains off of it and using that fatty acid either for energy

or to store later to use his energy as fat. Okay, that's the naturally occurring stuff. So for polyester sucrose, it has a sucrose molecule and it's surrounded by hydrocarbon chains too, but there's a lot of them, so much so that the parts of your body that normally metabolize fat can't break through all those hydrocarbon chains. And so that molecule of polyester sucrose goes through your body untouched. It comes

out the other end just like it went in. So you get the mouth feel, you get the taste you get, Yeah, you get the experience of eating fatty foods with no fat and no weight gain whatsoever. Her The problem is on the other side, when it does come out, it comes out with a lot of poop and a lot of cramping. And there's another problem with this whole thing that we'll talk about right after this. All right, So nice job, by the way with the science. Thank you.

I appreciate that you're welcome, because I was not ready any time. Uh So they discovered with olestra, this is great. It just comes out the body like it goes in. These idiots will still eat it. It It doesn't metabolize. Here's here's the big issue with that is the body is used to metabolizing fats, but now all of a sudden, your body gets confused because it's used to doing things one way, and all of a sudden your body is like, well, wait a minute, maybe maybe I shouldn't metabolize any fats.

Fool me once, yeah, kind of, And so it messed with the body chemistry because it literally confused it in these artificial fats. And I think this is true a lot of times with artificial ingredients, your body doesn't know how to react to that. Uh. And so all of a sudden, you're gaining weight even though you're eating fat free foods because your body is not metabolizing any fats.

So when you eat you indulge on that cheese steak, it's not getting metabolized no, because so like the polyester sucros gets passed through it, your body doesn't absorb it, but your body will absorb naturally occurring fats even if they're not metabolized. It gets stored for fat later. So if your body is not metabolizing either of it, then all the fat that's going through is just being packed on. People who were eating this fat free fat substitute, we're

actually gaining weight from recent research shows amazing. Even worse than that possibly is that the alestra was like a magnet for vitamins and nutrients, So when it passed through your digestive system untouched, it actually was taking vitamins and nutrients that were already present with it. So you can actually develop a vitamin deficiency from eating too much alestra. However, despite all of this, I know this is the kicker, uh. Initial sales of these chips, just these those wild chips

was about four hundred million dollars in that year. Uh. That was the I believe the first year that Procter and Game will debut these chips. Everyone is pooping their pants, they're eating I think they found in studies that the wild de rito's uh, if you ate sixteen of those chips, uh, fifty of the participants. Half the people that ate at

least steam chips got diarrhea. Right. Uh, So you would think they find this out, they make their money, and then they get out and they're just like, all right, we're done with a lester because I don't see a lester anymore on any packaging. Right, Yeah, it's gone the way of the dinosaur. Is that Is that the case, my friend? That is absolutely not the case. No, it's

just not called o lester anymore. Yeah. Back in two thousand two, the FDA said, you know what, we were pretty wasted when we made you put that that warning label on. We've since entered the program and we want to make amends, so you don't have to put the warning label on any longer. You can just take that off. Yeah, and now you don't see them as well, because that got a bad name by association. Now you just see them as light chips or fat free uh crackers and

things like that. Yeah. So they're still using polyester sucros in certain products like Lays light potato chips or Ruffles light or fat free ritz or fat free wheat thins um, but they just don't call it all estra or olean or anything like that. It's still the same thing. But I think that that Procter and Gamble managed to get that label taken off because they successfully argued that the results were really no worse than if you ate a lot of like high fibers. They're like, I mean, look

at prune juice. Yeah, I have a special label on that. Everybody loves prune juice, but you have no label. Nobody likes brune juice. No, what are prunes made from? Are they dates or um? Uh? I always get those confused, the the dehydrated um. You know what I'm talking about? Prunes? Right? So what is a prune? Is it a figure? A uh? Is a date? A dehydrated version of something. I'm just

enjoying this. I think a prune is a plum? Okay, great, great, Well, then a date is a dehydrated fig. My friend, and a raisin is a dehydrated grape. That's right, and that concludes this episode of short Stuff. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with let's send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com