The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [103]
Before Olestra can be used for home cooking, something drastic must be done. Actually, something drastic has been done. I was the first outsider ever shown an experimental form of Olestra that is wonderfully liquid at both room and frying temperatures, but which somehow stiffens within the body. The people at P & G were annoyingly laconic about this apparently perfect, light golden Olestra because they are afraid, they said, of tipping off their competitors. (They obviously wanted me to write about it or they would not have shown it to me—I did not discover it in some broom closet.) But I was allowed to fry with it for hours on end, and the results were excellent—nearly as crisp and much less greasy, with a light, translucent taste. P & G has no immediate plans to petition the FDA because, I suspect, approval will require a massive series of additional animal and human tests. Otherwise, P & G would rush it to market.
Flying back from Cincinnati, still intoxicated by the promise of Olestra, I grew preoccupied with some of the darker questions.
Will Olestra make you too skinny? The FDA did not even consider, officially at least, whether Olestra will make you skinny at all. When somebody applies for permission to introduce a novel substance into the American food supply, the FDA has only one legal responsibility: to find out whether the new food is safe to eat, not whether it is effective or delicious or desirable. (Drugs are evaluated also for their effectiveness.) P & G’s weight-loss research is promising but very short-term.
As for the gastrointestinal effects, I can testify that after a solid day of cooking with Olestra, munching on the results, consuming five times the amount the FDA ever envisioned, and dipping regularly into the bags of Olestra corn and potato chips that now sit next to my computer, I did not have the slightest trouble. My wife, who always claims to have a more delicate stomach than mine, had no problems either, and loved the taste and crunchy texture. There is no doubt that some people, apparently a small number, do suffer from cramps, diarrhea, or passive oil loss. But the FDA assures us that any GI symptoms disappear as soon as you stop eating the stuff—with no lasting discomfort.
There is one very serious potential consequence of eating Olestra, and the FDA sidestepped the issue in a way that may come back to haunt it.
Some of the vitamins in the foods we eat are fat soluble—principally vitamins A, D, E, and K. When they are eaten at about the same time we eat Olestra, some of them dissolve in the Olestra and pass from our bodies unabsorbed. The press has inaccurately described this as “flushing” or “vacuuming” or “sweeping” the vitamins right out of our systems. Olestra carries off only a portion of the fat-soluble vitamins that you consume within two hours on either side of the Olestra. If you eat Olestra potato chips in the afternoon, the vitamins in your dinner will be unaffected.
Procter & Gamble and the FDA have calculated the amount of replacement vitamins that need to be added to Olestra itself or into the foods made with it to set everything right, even for heavy snackers, and this is what P & G has done. The results seem sensible to me. If you are still concerned, read the FDA’s research summary in the Federal Register (vol. 61, no. 20, January 30, 1996, Rules and Regulations). What level of vitamin supplementation will be needed when we consume Olestra all day, every day, in every snack and at every meal, as the main added fat in our diets—as I have hopes we will? The easy answer is to take a vitamin pill every morning, an hour or two before or after slathering your Olestra-lard