For decades, chemists struggled to find something that would duplicate the functions of fat in food without the calories. Food fried in fat is often tasty, with good “mouthfeel”, etc.
When Olestra™ came out in the US, I used to drive across the border from Canada to load up on guilt-free Pringles. I never ate olestra in quantity and had no problems with digestion or dumping.
You know what happened. People ate it by the sackful. If you don’t absorb fat it ends up in your stool - steatorrhea makes feces float and smell more unpleasant. Critics coined an unpleasant term that implied a loss of control over movements. When that term caught on, Olestra disappeared.
But why? Olestra functioned as you would expect it to. Presumably, you could easily add more fiber or other things to the food to minimize symptoms - which could be another nutritional plus. Lots of sugar alcohols cause similar gut changes.
One would expect the companies that did these decades of expensive research to make improvements, then release it under a different name unsoiled in the public eye. So why didn’t this happen?
Also, didn’t the trend of demonizing fat start ebbing around that time as well, ya know, the whole “your body needs fat” thing? IIRC people ate a lot of “fat free” shit thinking it would be healthier, and ended up still being overweight, and wondering WTF? Essentially, the trend away from “fat-free” also meant less interest in fat-less alternatives?
Sure. But I never experienced anything melodramatic. Am not surprised given the mechanism. And don’t believe this couldn’t be mitigated even if you needed a different name.
The point about “peak fat” is interesting, though. People still say this about olive and avocado, of course. It depends what you are eating. Most of the fat in chips is not saturated, the calories are worse than the fat if you eat them in quantity.
Even if they tried this, the fact that it’s just a renamed Olestra would rapidly become known, especially in an era of ubiquitous social media. There’d have to be some legal filings around the new trade name for it, and it would still appear on the list of ingredients.
Company: “We this new fat substitute that won’t make you gain weight!”
Consumers: “Wait…that sounds a lot like that old ‘anal leakage’ stuff…”
Dietary fat is no longer the boogeyman it once was.
We’re not quite to the point of ‘There’s a pill for that now,’ but shifting public opinion means not many people will make the compromise.
I wonder if the original purveyors would have been better off using Olestra to replace some of the fat. You think it would have been studied and tested for years before making its explosive debut. That said, I am willing to blame some of it on hysteria and unfortunate words; I never noticed anything at all.
I’m doubtful that there’s a significant way to mitigate olestra’s side effects other than reducing/discontinuing intake. Fiber doesn’t do it, according to the literature, and my own experiences with patients and my own kid’s steatorrhea from CF. In fact it tended to make it even more explosive with even more urgency. And Olestra’s own manufacturers recommend symptom mitigation by reducing the amount of their product that one consumes.
The fact remains there are lots of food ingredients out there that cause digestive issues in excess. Sorbitol comes to mind. Whatever it is in Jerusalem artichokes (inulin?)
Indeed. Sorbitol and other “sugar alcohols” are popular in sugar-free foods (candies, cookies, etc.), but are also famous (infamous) for their laxative effects.
I developed diabetes 20 years ago, and had to cut out sugary stuff from my diet; it wasn’t too long after that that I discovered just what a number even a fairly small amount of sorbitol does on my gut.
The Amazon reviews on Haribo’s sugar-free gummi bears became legendary, for this reason.
