R E C E N T L Y Farmers of the American Dream By Carol Lloyd Financial infomercials promise "free money," but what they're really selling is their faith in your "potential" (07/24/98) Glutton for luxury By Heather Chaplin One woman's necessity is another woman's excess (07/17/98) Our watches, our selves By Robert Bryce As the economy keeps on ticking, the watch industry sells the daze of our lives (07/10/98) Pot of gold or P.C. money pit? By Heather Chaplin Are socially responsibility mutual funds good karma or bad business? (07/03/98) Swamped By Todd Pitock If everyone is working so hard, why are they always at lunch? (06/26/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Money archives		The economy of fake fat - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PROCTER & GAMBLE HAS SPENT MILLIONS OF DOLLARS BRINGING OLESTRA TO MARKET, BUT WILL AMERICA INVEST IN THE SNACKS THAT DIVEST THEIR BOWELS? BY HEATHER CHAPLIN | Call me squeamish, but any product with the phrase "loose stools" on its warning label makes me nervous. I'm referring of course to Procter & Gamble's much-heralded fake fat, Olestra. It took 25 years and $500 million to get it to market and by God it had better make Midwesterners thinner and P&G richer. All it needs now is to convince consumers that anal leakage and lost nutrients are an OK part of the bargain. It's a simple concept really -- Olestra is a fat made up of molecules too big to be absorbed by the human body. In other words, Olestra passes right through the digestive tract without stopping to deposit pesky calories the way natural fat does. Think of it as the bulimic approach to snack food: You eat it; you rid your body of it; you had the experience; you don't have the calories; no harm done. Elegant, as they say in science. Except, just as bulimics can experience some annoying side effects -- rotted teeth, severe dehydration and heart attacks to name a few -- so too may Olestra cause problems. Approved for "salty snack foods" by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996, Olestra -- under the brand name Olean -- was first released in Frito Lay's WOW brand potato chip in a few Midwestern cities that same year. After spending so much to develop the product, P&G was no doubt pleased to see its test subjects spend $58 million on the chips during their first eight weeks on the market, making WOW perhaps the bestselling new food product of all time. And that's despite an FDA-mandated label on all Olestra products stating that the fake fat can cause "abdominal cramping and loose stools" and can inhibit the body from absorbing essential vitamins. Sounds bad enough, but actually even nastier phrases have been bandied about over the years in P&G literature, FDA reports and the business pages. "Anal leakage," "anal oil leakage" and "stained underwear" were my personal favorites, and I was sorry to see them go. I still wonder, though: If "loose stools" was the best they could come up with, just how grotesque is this problem anyway? I found out last month in Bozeman, Mont. Locked in a motel room working while my boyfriend was out discovering the joys of the wild West, I stumbled upon the motherlode of Olestra products in our suite's kitchenette cabinet. There were sour cream and onion chips, "bar-b-q" chips, regular flavor, Doritos, pretzels. It was an experiment waiting to happen. I did get some work done that day, but mostly I devoured sour cream and onion Pringles -- in the name of science, of course. Procter & Gamble can say whatever it wants, but to me, those chips just didn't taste that good. They have the texture of real potato chips, but there's a chemical, almost greasy aftertaste that's unpleasant -- not bad enough to stop me from eating the whole canister, of course, but bad enough to hamper my enjoyment. As to that other matter, I will say only this: It's going to be a long time before I look at a potato chip again without visceral growling and serious ambivalence. When I returned to civilization, I did a little research. The initial studies on Olestra -- and there were hundreds of them -- obviously raised enough concern to warrant a warning label. At last month's FDA review, however, P&G presented new studies showing Olestra consumers had no more stomach troubles than people eating similar amounts of non-Olestra snacks. P&G also says that while some people did experience "oil loss" with early Olestra products, it has since been able to "control" this problem. "Hogwash and junk science," says Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group, which has declared war on Olestra. Jacobson said P&G's recent studies were designed specifically to conceal any problems with its product, which Jacobson claims has stirred up more complaints from consumers than any other food product in history. By his count, there have been about 8,500 complaints since the product's release. The center set up a hot line to monitor troubles, but it had to discontinue ads announcing the service because it couldn't handle the volume of calls received. There are the four people who ended up in the emergency room; the woman who spent the night in her bathroom; the man who had to rush home from work. And those aren't even Jacobson's trump cards. Of even more concern, he says, is the possibility that Olestra inhibits the body not only from absorbing fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, but also from absorbing carotenoids, usually found in carrots and leafy greens and thought to help protect us from heart disease and cancer. For sure, Olestra's not the first product catering to Americans' conflicting desires concerning food and weight. The low-fat and fat-free industry is huge, despite the fact that most so-called diet foods have only minimally fewer calories, expose users to health risks, have never been proven to actually aid in weight loss and tend to taste like crap. The company that finds a safe, truly low-calorie, tasty cooking oil wins. Period. Whether that's P&G with Olestra remains to be seen. Leonard Teitlebaum at Merrill Lynch told me the jury's still out. "I think a lot of people are very glad it's Frito Lay out there first," he said. In response to questions about whether people will tolerate diarrhea should Olestra cause it, Teitlebaum drew a distinction between foods that cause medical problems now and those that prove dangerous in the long run. He pointed to Tab, one of the first diet sodas, which he said tasted horrible, and was later found to cause cancer in lab rats. "I haven't met a person yet who can't learn to like what they want to like," he said. "But if you eat a bag of WOW and you have to take the next train home, you're not going to eat them again." As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing is ridiculous: Just don't eat the chips if you don't want the calories. But as my brother points out, "Potato chips are real good." And with my Diet Coke habit I'm clearly in the "as long as it's not happening now, I don't care " camp, also known as the real moron camp. So who am I to judge? Maybe I'm just too narrow-minded to realize that Olestra is the logical next step in the evolution of food, leading us to a day when eating will be reduced to simply an act of entertainment. Scarfing a bag of potato chips will be like going to the movies: something we do for fun, sans irritating bodily consequences like caloric or nutritional intake. And I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Hell, I've dreamed of such advances. But the fact is, Olestra's not there yet. At this point, it's just another product with a sketchy health record, profiting from people's confusion about what is and isn't good for them. But what does P&G care if Olestra causes loose stools or even anal leakage? It makes Charmin and Tide as well. SALON | July, 31 1998