The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [99]
Does white sugar give you cavities? Sure it does. But no more than any other fermentable carbohydrate. More important is the form the carbohydrate takes. Sticky carbohydrates like syrups, honeys, and raisins cling to your teeth and have more time to do their damage. Children and adults with a proclivity to cavities should vigorously rinse out their mouths after eating any kind of sticky carbohydrate.
It was the nutritionists of the 1970s who sent America into a panic about white sugar. As a consequence, we consume vast amounts of artificial sweeteners (even though several brands carry warning labels that they cause cancer in laboratory animals). More damaging to American gastronomy, we eat distasteful “sugarless” desserts and jams sweetened with concentrated apple or grape juice or pulverized dried apples, all of which contain just as many sugar molecules as sucrose but taste of boiled fruit juice instead of the pure, crystalline clarity we hunger for. Many nutritionists today are worried that people get so distracted by their irrational fear of sugar that they forget the really serious problems in our diets, especially our prodigal consumption of animal fat. That’s what I call sweet revenge.
October 1992
A Fat of No Consequence
High over Cincinnati, heading back to New York, I writhed in my procrustean airline seat and reflected upon the Second Age of Man. For that is precisely what we embarked upon, you and I, on January 24, 1996—the day the FDA approved Olestra.
The First Age of Man, the Material Age, ran from 100,000 B.C. until the evening of January 23, A.D. 1996. It was called the Material Age because, while it lasted, human consciousness was trapped in its primitive physical housing, the body, and pleasure was inevitably followed by painful and expensive consequences. And then, on January 24, everything changed. The Second Age of Man, the Virtual Age, began with the legalization of the first nearly successful virtual pleasure—a virtual food, as it turns out—Olestra. The invention of birth control, coming near the end of the Material Age, was only a halfway step.
Olestra is the fat that passes unchanged, unchallenged, and unabsorbed through the human body. It is the fat without calories, without cholesterol, without heart disease, without cancer. Olestra is the fat without consequence. It is a molecular imitation, almost a parody, of fat.
All the fats and oils we eat are called triglycerides, because they consist of three fatty acid chains, each attached at one end to the same glycerol molecule. Olestra is quite similar, except that it has six or eight fatty acid chains on the outside, with a sucrose molecule, table sugar, in the middle. (That’s why the generic name for Olestra is sucrose polyester.) The fat-slicing enzymes in our intestines, accustomed to taking apart triglycerides for easy absorption into the bloodstream, cannot figure out what to do with this Medusa, and so Olestra keeps traveling down the digestive tract and out of the body, fatty acids and all. This smooth and easy transit can also cause problems, but we will get to them later.
Compared with Olestra, fat substitutes like Simplesse are impostors. They are not like fats at all but are carbohydrates or proteins mechanically whirled up to look like fat or feel like fat on the tongue. But eat them or heat them, and the illusion breaks down. Olestra is different. It looks like a fat and it acts like a fat in cooking, and it tastes like a fat—greasy and good. But once it has done its magic in the frying pan and on our palate, it simply disappears down the drain. Have you ever tasted a dish of fake ice cream made with Simplesse? Whoever invented this stuff should be taken out and forced to eat a dish of fake ice cream made with Simplesse.
I had followed the Olestra story practically since I learned to read. The molecule was first dreamed up in 1959; the idea was that all those extra fatty acids and sucrose could supply intense nourishment for