Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Olestra

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

In the 90s a fat free miracle food came out that promised we could eat all we wanted and not gain weight. But there was a caveat: it could also make your bowels unpleasantly loose. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. So let's get started. Everybody be quiet and listen. Get ready to feel like you're going to poop your pants because we're going to talk about O'Lestra. Which would make you poop your pants. Yeah, so this one starts back in the fifties.

We can't talk about O'Lestra without mentioning the seven country study, which was very famous in the fifties 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 going to put out no fat stuff and start pumping in high fructose corn syrup into our things to create flavor and the world is the worst for it. Right. So I think we need to do a straight up stuff you should know episode about the seven country

study. For sure. So let's stop talking about it now. So the upshot of what you just said is that we live in, 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 give it to you, we'll do some of those amazing things that Chuck just mentioned. And 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 healthy choice, I think healthy choice is still around. So they came out with a line of foods and in 1994, healthy choice, just the healthy choice line of food made $1.3 billion in sales. Like that's how much that people were like, here, take all my money, just give me some fat free foods cause fat's going to kill me and make me fat. And 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 that we were 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 by this time, I believe it was Procter and Gamble that came up with the Alestra, right? Yeah. They came up with that.

That's just their trade name for polyester sucrose and this was developed by them in the late sixties, but it took to the 1990s 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 Alestra would make you poop your pants and they pressed on anyway 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 feed premature infants.

Yeah. Which is a sweet start. It is a sweet start. And hopefully they realized very quickly that no infant should ever have polyester sucrose pass through its mouth. It's probably hard to tell with babies. Yeah. That's true.

But it's not hard to tell with adults and like you said, their product testing showed there are some real problems with Alestra when you ate it. 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 were red flags and should have been to Procter and Gamble 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 had spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars developing this stuff by this time and been in development for like 30 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 label, I remember seeing it.

It literally said it could cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. They were marketed for their line for like Pringles and Frida LA as wow, all uppercase 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, right? Because they could. Yeah. And so we should probably talk real quick about the science behind this, right? Yeah, let's do it. So polyester sucrose mimics fat in its taste, its mouthfeel. It does everything that fat does except get metabolized by the body, right? So like a triglyceride and naturally occurring fat is a molecule, fatty acids surrounded

by three chains of hydrocarbons. And when you eat that thing, that molecule, 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 as energy as fat, okay? Yeah. 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 mouthfeel. You get the taste. Sort of. Yeah.

You get the experience of eating fatty foods with no fat and no weight gain whatsoever. 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. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the

backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so nice job, by the way, with the science.

Thank you. I appreciate that. You're welcome. Thank you. Anytime. So they discovered with Alestra that this is great. It just comes out the body like it goes in. These idiots will still eat it.

It doesn't metabolize. 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's like, well, wait a minute, maybe I shouldn't metabolize any fats. Fool me once. Yeah. Kind of.

Yeah. And so it messed with the body chemistry because it literally confused it into 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. And so all of a sudden, you're gaining weight, even though you're eating fat-free foods, because your body's not metabolizing any fats. So when you eat, you indulge on that cheese steak, it's not getting metabolized.

No, because the polyester sucrose 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's not metabolizing either of it, then all the fat that's going through is just being packed on. So people who are eating this fat-free fat substitute, we're actually gaining weight from recent research shows. Amazing.

Even worse than that, possibly, is that the elestra 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 could actually develop a vitamin deficiency from eating too much elestra. However, despite all of this... I know, this is the kicker. In 1998, initial sales of these chips, just those wild chips, was about $400 million in

that year. That was, I believe, the first year that Procter & Gamble debuted these chips. Everyone is pooping their pants. They're eating... I think they found in studies that the wild Doritos, if you ate 16 of those chips, 50% of the participants, half the people that ate at least 16 chips, got diarrhea. 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 elestra, because I don't see elestra anymore

on any packaging. Right. Yeah, it's gone the way of the dinosaur. Is that the case, my friend? That is absolutely not the case. No, it's just not called elestra anymore. Yeah, back in 2002, the FDA said, you know what? We were pretty wasted when we made you put 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 wow, because that got a bad name by association. Now you just see them as light chips or fat-free crackers and things like that. Yeah, so they're still using polyester sucrose in certain products, like Lay's light potato chips or Ruffles light or fat-free rits or fat-free wheat things, but they just don't call it elestra or oline or anything like that.

It's still the same thing, but I think that Proctor 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 high-fiber prunes. Yeah, they're like, hey, I mean, look at prune juice. Yeah. Do you have a special label on that? Everybody loves prune juice, but there's no label. Nobody likes prune juice.

No. What are prunes made from, are they dates or... I always get those confused, the dehydrated, you know what I'm talking about. I know, prunes. Right. So what is a prune? Is it a figure, is a date a dehydrated version of something? I'm just enjoying this.

All right. 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. Oh, okay.

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