Except that it leaves a bit of a filmy after taste in your mouth. Not much of one though.
It does, but so do some cheaper regular oils, IMHO.
From Wikipedia (so take your chips with a grain of salt):
The anal leakage comes from the undigested fats seperating out in the intestine but not being absorbed. According to the article, the formulation has been modified to prevent seperation. However, if you eat too much regular oil (or buttered popcorn) you’ll have the same effect (which will vary from person to person anyway.)
Or, you could just eat something healthy…like carrot sticks. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Never mind.
Stranger
As Jay Leno said, “After you finish the Pringles, don’t throw the can away!”
Olestra is not available in Canada. I always get funny looks from the customs folks when I tell them I bought back ten cans of Fat Free Pringles. I binge on them, and have no problems with anal leakage. Lots of people who worry about this so-called side effect seem to be willing to take Xenical and expensive medicines that do basically the same thing!
I have eaten the Ruffles potato chips with Olestra many times with no ill effects and find the taste to be about the same as their regular chips.
Nowadays I find that I eat a lot of Fritos Corn Chips, which I love. Does anyone know of an Fritos-style corn chip being made with Olestra?
back when Olestra first came out, Rush Limbaugh sat on the air eating an entire bag of potato chips made with it. He was making fun of the “food nazis” who were warning about it. I don’t recall him ever doing THAT again.
And I think I know why: about 6 hours after I had eaten several handfuls of chips made with Olestra (they were very delicious, by the way) I thought my bowels were going to explode. And I can usually eat anything. About a year after that I accidentally bought and ate a bag of “Wow” Dorritos made with Olestra. Guess I didn’t look at the package very good before consuming them. 2 hours later I thought I was going to have to sh*t in the top drawer of my desk at work because I didn’t think I’d make it to the restroom!
God bless you if you can eat chips with Olestra in it. They are quite tasty. But for some of us it clears our intestines like a white…make that a brown tornado!
What are you talking about? That is his hobby!
I have the feeling Olestra is another underserved villain of supposedly Bad Things[sup]TM[/sup]. Others include:
Bee Stings. Most people think they’re allergic to them. But very few (less than 1%) are.
Wool. How many people have told you they’re allergic to wool? The truth is that no one is allergic to wool.
MSG. I wish I had a dollar for every them I heard someone claim MSG made them sweat, or cause heart palpitations, or whatever. (This usually occurs when we’re talking about Chinese carryout.) Unbeknownst to them, a lot of food contains MSG.
I eat Lays chips with Olestra all the time, and they are no problem for me. I chalk up the hysteria about them to the completely misnamed “Center for Science in the Public Interest.” I wonder why anyone takes that group seriously – they complain about everything and they do so with little basis in scientific fact.
But some people, like me, are allergic to lanolin, which is the oil in wool. So while I’m not technically allergic to wool, I can’t wear it because I will have an allergic reaction. I also have an allergic reaction to products like skin lotion containing lanolin.
I’ve never tried Olestra, though, so I don’t know how I would react to it.
A lot of those people do realize that MSG is in lots of other foods; snack foods are the worst. Sometimes it’s listed in the ingredients as “natural flavoring.”