Maintenance Phase - Olestra

00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that keeps saying it doesn't

00:00:15.800 want to talk about poop, but it's really like conceptually painted itself into a corner.

00:00:22.440 I have spent the last three weeks livid about doing this episode, even though I don't know

00:00:28.920 who i'm angry at i'm just angry when you picked it i was very surprised i was like the one that's

00:00:35.520 famously poopy the poopisode yes i'm aubrey gordon and i'm here with my co-host michael hobbs you can

00:00:44.720 find us on patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase we also have t-shirts and masks and phone

00:00:52.060 cases and tote bags and all kinds of stuff on t public both of those are linked for your

00:00:57.320 convenience at maintenancephase.com. You know what we don't have, Aubrey? Fat-free potato chips.

00:01:03.760 Yeah. That make you feel weird in your downstairs. So can you tell me what you know about this

00:01:11.980 ingredient Olestra and the history of it? So Olestra, brand name Olene. Yes. Burst onto the

00:01:20.000 market sometime in the mid 90s, right in the middle of my fat kid adolescence. What I remember

00:01:27.420 most distinctly, they were wow, potato chips from Frito-Lay. Yes. I don't know if I ever tried them,

00:01:34.780 but I definitely remember feeling like this is for me. And of course, I remember nonstop jokes

00:01:42.300 about the phrase anal leakage. Yes. This is my primary memory as well. Poop jokes. It's your 0.98

00:01:48.120 nightmare. I know exactly. Poop jokes as far as the eye can see. This is where my trauma about

00:01:53.000 this comes from. Yes. That's about all I remember. Okay. I'm super curious to hear about how did all

00:02:00.480 this start? Yes. First, we have to talk about it as a science story and then we have to talk about

00:02:05.320 it as a politics story. Oh. So Olester is actually a combination of oil and table sugar. What? Yes.

00:02:13.060 It was discovered by Procter & Gamble in 1968 by accident.

00:02:18.240 They were not looking for a fat that wasn't fat.

00:02:21.340 They were actually looking for the exact opposite.

00:02:23.840 So they were working on baby foods that would actually absorb more calories.

00:02:29.580 So they were doing all this weird – I don't understand how chemistry works.

00:02:32.440 But they were doing all kinds of weird chemistry about like taking apart fats and putting fats back together and mixing them with other ingredients to try to get something that would help babies fatten up essentially.

00:02:43.060 and they came up with this molecule that is sucrose polyester and they tested it not on

00:02:49.600 babies because that's super unethical but i think on rats or something and they found out that it

00:02:54.020 just went right through them the rat became a straw and so they were like huh there might be

00:03:00.040 something here i genuinely can't think of a bigger outrage factory than the concept of baby testing

00:03:07.120 i know exactly exactly some of the old research that you find on this it's like when they started

00:03:13.820 testing it on babies i'm like they absolutely did not test this on babies and if they did

00:03:19.120 someone needs to work on a book about this whoa the way that it works basically you start with

00:03:24.200 table sugar normal ass table sugar and vegetable oil and there are chemical processes that you can

00:03:30.280 do to break the vegetable oil into its constituent parts. So you basically break off the fatty acids

00:03:37.300 from the sort of backbone of the fat molecule. And then you take those fatty acids and I don't

00:03:43.700 put them in a blender. I don't exactly know how this works, but you blend them with sugar. And so

00:03:48.740 what happens when you put the whole thing back together is you end up with a fat molecule that

00:03:53.260 is more than twice as big as an ordinary fat molecule. And nothing about that, like chemically,

00:03:59.460 it can't be broken down by the bacteria in your small or your large intestine so it's essentially

00:04:04.880 like if you swallowed like a pebble literally one of the scientific papers i came across actually

00:04:09.900 says it's the same reason we can't digest wood so the the central genius of olustra is that to your

00:04:17.080 gut it is wood right none of it gets absorbed and therefore none of the calories go into your body

00:04:23.380 like it doesn't register as calories but to your mouth it is like totally normal fat huh it's

00:04:29.100 Actually, more of a process than a substance.

00:04:32.800 So one of the few sources I found on this was a book called The Man Who Ate Everything by friend of the show, Jeffrey Steingarten, this writer for Vogue who we talked about in our Master Cleanse episode.

00:04:44.140 Yeah.

00:04:44.580 So he has a chapter in his book about cooking with Olestra.

00:04:47.680 He says, they can make Olestra butter and bake golden croissants with the fat calories of a piece of dry toast.

00:04:54.160 They can make beef tallow Olestra for cooking truly perfect French fries.

00:04:58.420 they can make cocoa butter olestra and mold bars of smooth rich dark chocolate they can make lard

00:05:04.400 olestra and roll out pie crust so light and flaky that you'll have to nail it to the kitchen table

00:05:09.200 to keep it from floating away uh-huh so something i didn't know until i started working on this was

00:05:13.740 like olestra is a it's a thing like you can you can make just like a ball of olestra apparently

00:05:19.320 it looks like vaseline but it has the consistency of sort of mayonnaise oh oh oh those are two

00:05:26.620 unappealing description it's not great so basically procter and gamble has discovered

00:05:31.220 this miracle fat but they don't really know what they have on their hands yet throughout the 1960s

00:05:35.920 and 1970s they start testing it oh luster poses a really interesting conundrum for sort of the

00:05:42.160 food additive approval process because the entire system of sort of figuring out you know those like

00:05:49.340 colorings that they add to sodas and stuff like yellow five and like red 20 and whatever sure

00:05:54.520 The entire process is built around the fact that these food additives, we're all consuming very small amounts of them.

00:06:00.740 Even if you drink five sodas a day, the amount of yellow five that you're getting is like a fraction of a teaspoon.

00:06:07.200 So the way that they test these food additives to see if they cause cancer or whatever is they give rats 100-fold the dose.

00:06:16.240 And then from that, you can kind of extrapolate, well, you know, maybe smaller doses over the long term would cause similar effects.

00:06:22.160 That's the entire paradigm of testing food additives.

00:06:25.520 I will say I remember this from my middle school defenses of Diet Coke.

00:06:30.980 Oh, yeah.

00:06:31.380 When people were like, Diet Coke gives you cancer.

00:06:33.800 And I was like, that research is when they inject 100 times their body weight directly

00:06:38.220 into a rat brain or whatever.

00:06:40.120 I was just like, leave me alone. 0.96

00:06:41.260 Let me have Diet Coke.

00:06:42.380 I have so little.

00:06:43.560 I know.

00:06:44.280 It's a genuine conundrum for these things, right?

00:06:46.160 Because how do you test something that might be harmful without actually harming humans?

00:06:50.780 Absolutely.

00:06:51.180 And so the problem with Olestra is that it's an actual substance.

00:06:55.680 Like you can't make a croissant with a hundred times the butter in it because like that's physically impossible.

00:07:02.140 Yeah.

00:07:02.380 There's this – you know, they discover Olestra in 1968 and it's not approved until 1996.

00:07:08.100 There's almost 30 years of Procter & Gamble and the FDA

00:07:11.980 essentially redesigning all of these testing procedures

00:07:15.520 around this substance that no other substance like this

00:07:19.340 has ever been tested as a food additive.

00:07:22.320 There's articles that come out in 1996 that call Olestra

00:07:25.500 the most tested substance in human history.

00:07:28.720 One of the scientific articles that I found says,

00:07:31.140 the safety of Olestra has been investigated in more than 100

00:07:34.280 long and short-term studies in seven species and in more than 20,000 people, including children

00:07:40.580 and people with existing gastrointestinal disease.

00:07:43.700 Whoa! 0.97

00:07:44.160 They test the shit out of this because at the end of this rainbow, there is potentially 0.98

00:07:48.800 billions of dollars for Procter & Gamble in this, and they know this. 0.98

00:07:52.260 Right.

00:07:52.480 This is the promise of like every diet and diet food ever is like eat whatever you want

00:07:59.000 and never gain a pound is like the phrase, right?

00:08:02.160 So if they can make that true, congratulations, you just signed the deed to Fort Knox.

00:08:08.040 Exactly.

00:08:08.800 It's literally all of the taste and none of the calories.

00:08:11.460 Like this is what every dieter dreams of and every food company dreams of.

00:08:15.360 Totally.

00:08:15.720 So Procter & Gamble eventually spends $500 million on this. 0.99

00:08:19.320 Holy shit. 1.00

00:08:20.520 I mean, some of that is like marketing and like planting a bunch of soybeans and weird shit. 0.99

00:08:25.500 Like they inflate the number in various ways when they're trying to get approval. 0.58

00:08:29.620 but at least half of that is actual research and development. So as they're going through

00:08:35.880 this 25-ish year testing process, they find two downsides, one of which has been documented

00:08:43.820 extensively. The other one is less well-known. So the first downside is that not only does

00:08:50.420 Olestra not get absorbed, it actually sucks nutrients out of other foods.

00:08:56.240 What?

00:08:57.100 Yes.

00:08:57.780 So it actually, it's kind of like this rolling snowball that goes through your body and like

00:09:02.180 picks up other things along the way.

00:09:04.560 So the first thing they find out when they're testing this is that it removes vitamins A,

00:09:09.340 D, E, and K.

00:09:10.780 Like A and K in particular? 0.99

00:09:13.600 And D, and E, fuck, they're all like so important for your body to have them. 0.99

00:09:19.420 You need those. 0.99

00:09:20.300 They're not like these filler vitamins.

00:09:22.160 It also, have you heard of carotenoids?

00:09:24.800 I have heard the term.

00:09:26.500 I do not know what it means.

00:09:27.740 So carotenoids are basically why fruits and vegetables are good for you, or one of the

00:09:33.620 main reasons.

00:09:34.520 The most famous one is beta carotene in carrots, right?

00:09:37.440 There's more than 500 carotenoids in like all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and those

00:09:42.780 are just the ones that we know about. 0.98

00:09:44.400 And Olestra also sucks those up. 1.00

00:09:47.420 Oh, shit. 1.00

00:09:48.400 Carotenoids are fat soluble, so they dissolve in fat, and then the fat gets absorbed. 0.99

00:09:53.240 but if the fat doesn't get absorbed they're just dissolving into the fat and then the fat goes away

00:09:57.860 this feels like something that like like an evil scientist would make in a movie yeah will lead

00:10:04.180 people to think that they're being more healthy and actually we're sucking all the life force out

00:10:09.560 it's like dementors and this is wild if you go on google scholar you can find research from now like

00:10:15.600 very recent research showing that you can actually use olestra to remove poisons from people's

00:10:21.680 systems. What? Yeah, like there's certain things that like, you know, occupational poisons that

00:10:26.680 people sort of get exposed to. And if you eat Olester, it will actually remove those things

00:10:31.180 from you. Yeah, you just poop it all out. But it's a huge problem for Procter & Gamble and for the

00:10:35.520 FDA because the stuff with the vitamins, you can fortify foods with extra vitamins that kind of

00:10:42.080 counterbalance the amount of vitamin A, D, E, K. But you can't fortify foods with carotenoids

00:10:47.700 because we don't really understand how carotenoids work.

00:10:50.560 This is where it starts to feel like our sort of dogged pursuit of diet foods

00:10:55.180 becomes this place where we get way out over our skis, sort of scientifically,

00:11:00.700 where I'm just like, okay, but what if we just, 0.91

00:11:03.220 instead of spending all this fucking money testing out Alestra, 0.91

00:11:07.180 what if we spent all this money being like, how do carotenoids work? 0.97

00:11:10.740 It would just be so great if our first question was about access,

00:11:13.980 not about like, but how does it make me thin?

00:11:15.980 Well, this is sort of the central thing with putting weight in the front of all of our health efforts.

00:11:21.740 This is the real problem because then in the drive to lose weight, we're actually fine with things that reduce health.

00:11:28.340 That like, OK, this thing robs your body of all these nutrients, but it'll make you thin.

00:11:33.380 So it's an OK tradeoff.

00:11:34.980 Yeah, totally.

00:11:35.380 I mean, it's like between this and Fen-Fen and Redux, we have a couple of like massive 90s examples of sorry about your heart valve, sorry about your lungs, sorry about your poop, and sorry about your carotenoids.

00:11:53.480 Nothing matters as much as being thin.

00:11:57.400 So that's one downside that it removes all these other nutrients.

00:12:00.800 The other downside is the downside we all know about.

00:12:03.980 so a parent okay according to my parents i'm i'm going on a digression because i i want to have

00:12:11.940 euphemisms for talking about this for the rest of the episode so i guess when i was a kid i couldn't

00:12:18.120 say bowel movement when i was like four or five it was like a difficult thing for my little child

00:12:24.380 tongue to say so i started saying bamu and then my parents started saying bamu and it's like become

00:12:31.260 the whole thing that my family for decades now just says BAMU when we want to talk about like

00:12:35.940 downstairs backdoor stuff. So the second downside of Olestra is the BAMU stuff. Like the BAMU

00:12:43.840 things start showing up very quickly. They do show up very quickly. Famously.

00:12:48.580 This is an excerpt from one of the scientific articles that I found.

00:12:52.020 Olestra worked well, but not perfectly. Tests revealed that the indigestibility of the fat

00:12:57.220 molecule was causing what early Procter & Gamble documents described as leakage problems in the

00:13:03.300 stool of a percentage of the people who ate these fat-free foods. So in the early tests, this is one

00:13:09.220 of the effects of having this snowball ravaging through your body and then sort of melting.

00:13:14.360 This is an excerpt from Jeffrey Steingarten's book. The early, more liquid versions caused

00:13:18.500 gastrointestinal problems. One of these, anal seepage, or in my preference, passive oil loss,

00:13:25.080 occurs when fully liquid olestra separates from the food in which it was cooked and slips along

00:13:31.440 the inner walls of people's intestines, bypassing everything else in its way. Drops of olestra show

00:13:37.720 up on their underwear or floating in their toilets. The FDA actually abbreviates this as

00:13:43.540 OIT, oil in toilet. Passive oil loss sounds like something British petroleum should be concerned

00:13:50.700 with the euphemisms like we get into the jungle of euphemisms very quickly which i'm actually fine

00:13:57.120 with i don't i don't want to discuss you're like euphemism away i'm here for it so keep those two

00:14:03.800 downsides in your mind these are what they found in the early testing and now we're going to move

00:14:08.220 into the fda approval process oh based on our old friend the food drug and cosmetic act of 1938

00:14:16.480 ate, anyone can make a food additive and apply for approval from the FDA. But the obligation

00:14:24.880 is on the company itself to do the testing. So I, Michael Hobbs, cannot just like come up with

00:14:30.500 a food additive in my garage and be like, hi, FDA, I need you to spend 10 years and $50 million

00:14:36.760 testing this food additive to make sure it's safe before you approve it. The obligation is on me

00:14:42.440 to spend the money to conduct tests that meet the sort of the FDA's standards of quality

00:14:47.120 to show that my food additive is safe. And if it's safe, then I can start putting it in food.

00:14:52.480 Like that's the process. So that seems both good and bad.

00:14:56.580 Yes. This is exactly in my notes. Tell me what you think.

00:14:59.100 So on the one hand, it seems good in that like, yes, it shouldn't be the responsibility of the

00:15:04.820 state to test the products of private companies. Like fundamentally, it is their responsibility

00:15:10.400 to make sure it's safe. But also, if you turn over that testing to those private companies,

00:15:16.420 it absolutely incentivizes sort of like research structures that are more favorable to the

00:15:22.500 findings that you want. Yes. And also, it's not Michael Hobbs in his garage making food additives.

00:15:28.860 It's Procter & Gamble. Exactly. The least Michael Hobbs in his garage. I know.

00:15:34.980 That this world has ever seen. It's only massive corporations that are trying to do this. And the

00:15:39.720 FDA essentially has no power to run its own studies.

00:15:43.880 There's also the sort of probably even much bigger issue.

00:15:48.300 This comes up in a chapter in Marion Nestle's book, Food Politics.

00:15:52.780 She has a whole chapter on Olestra.

00:15:54.360 God bless Marion Nestle.

00:15:55.600 Noted Aubrey Gordon Stan, Marion Nestle.

00:15:58.600 I don't know about Stan, but I'll take like, she blurred my book and it was like one of

00:16:03.900 the greater days of my life.

00:16:05.560 So Marian Nestle is like a giant of these sort of food science politics field, and she got a copy of Aubrey's book and blurbed it, which made us both really happy.

00:16:14.440 Delightful.

00:16:15.020 So one of the things that Marian Nestle is obsessed with in her book, rightfully, is that this entire FDA approval process is designed around these other food additives, right, like Yellow 5, that, you know, do they cause cancer or not?

00:16:27.860 But there's nothing in this process about does it actually work?

00:16:32.300 Do people lose weight?

00:16:33.980 Does this help people?

00:16:35.160 That's not part of the process at all. It's all about this binary distinction. Does it cause harm or doesn't it cause harm? And if it doesn't cause harm, then you can put it on the market regardless of whether it does what it's supposed to do. So at no point during this entire 25 year, 20,000 human subject study process, do they test, does O'Lester help people lose weight? 0.75

00:16:58.200 So they're like, it will make you poop, but it won't give you cancer. Go to town.

00:17:02.020 So in 1987, Procter & Gamble files the sort of official food additive approval.

00:17:09.220 And so this takes nine years, this entire process.

00:17:11.980 And there's a lot of sort of chapters of this that I'm going to skip.

00:17:15.320 There's like a big fight about patents at one point.

00:17:18.220 There's a big fight about sort of can you put it in sweet stuff?

00:17:20.920 Can you put it in salty stuff?

00:17:22.240 It's really boring and really technical.

00:17:25.160 And I'm mostly just going to skip all that because this takes nine years and otherwise

00:17:28.520 we would be here all day.

00:17:29.480 So generally what you need to know is the entire nine-year approval fight is a battle between Procter & Gamble and a nonprofit organization called the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

00:17:43.440 Okay.

00:17:43.660 Have you heard of them?

00:17:44.400 I feel like that's a name that has come up at some point just in research for this show.

00:17:49.640 Yes.

00:17:50.120 I don't know more than just having heard the name.

00:17:52.700 So they are great.

00:17:53.660 I've interviewed them for various stories over the years.

00:17:55.700 But I also think that it's worth noting during this time in the late 80s and early 90s, CSPI and all these other organizations, nobody was really pushing back against the low-fat consensus.

00:18:09.140 So in all of these hearings and the debates around it, CSPI is making like this weird argument where they're saying like we have to get fat out of the American diet, but not this way.

00:18:19.180 They're basically accepting the terms of the debate, but just saying, oh, this particular additive shouldn't do it.

00:18:25.040 Yeah, it feels like such a tricky moment of just like, oh, politically, the 90s was a great time of people just accepting the terms of all kinds of debates.

00:18:33.920 I was thinking about this the other day, like the number of women that I grew up with who would go, I'm not a feminist, but.

00:18:39.640 Oh, my God, I know.

00:18:40.320 This is sort of the I'm not a feminist, but of things like, of course, we need to get rid of fat, just not this way. 1.00

00:18:45.300 Yes, exactly.

00:18:45.980 And so this is really one of the main problems with the debate over Olestra, this nine-year-long debate, is that the only real objections that the Center for Science and the Public Interest can make are these methodological objections.

00:18:59.260 We don't know about the long-term effects.

00:19:01.600 Most of the studies that Procter & Gamble has done have been small ends.

00:19:05.960 Most of them are short duration.

00:19:07.740 They're not testing large quantities.

00:19:10.360 That's really all they can do.

00:19:11.400 they can only make these process concerns because, you know, the FDA doesn't have the power to test

00:19:16.640 this product itself. And CSPI also doesn't have the money to do independent tests.

00:19:22.540 So all we can do is look at the data that Procter & Gamble is putting out and be like,

00:19:26.560 we have quibbles with the data. So it's just another sort of weakness in this process is

00:19:31.760 it's just really hard to make a case against a company when all of the information you're basing

00:19:36.560 it on is from the company. And none of it even has the cloak, I would imagine, at this point of

00:19:42.060 impartiality, right? Well, I mean, some of it, honestly, it's a weird debate because a lot of

00:19:48.380 the Procter & Gamble studies, they're not necessarily doing it themselves in their own

00:19:52.240 labs. They'll hire researchers from Johns Hopkins. One of the studies that they have that they present

00:19:57.740 to the FDA for approval, it's 100 subjects. It's a controlled eight-week diet. It's in a lab where

00:20:04.700 they're actually monitoring how much people are eating. They're giving some people like sort of

00:20:09.440 one can of Pringles a day. They're giving other people like three cans of Pringles a day. They're

00:20:14.300 giving other people placebo Pringles. And like they're testing, okay, is there a dose effect

00:20:19.140 on any of these BAMU symptoms? It's actually a pretty well-designed study.

00:20:23.700 That's great. Also, give me some of those placebo Pringles, please.

00:20:26.920 I know, exactly.

00:20:27.520 Thank you. Sounds good to me.

00:20:30.060 A lot of the studies, like I've read the sort of federal register of all the studies

00:20:33.740 that they submitted to the FDA in 1996 for approval. And on their face, they're pretty

00:20:38.800 good studies. One of the weirdest things about these gastrointestinal side effects is a lot of

00:20:45.700 the studies do actually show that when people are eating these like fat-free Olestra Pringles,

00:20:51.260 they'll actually report, I am more likely to have diarrhea. But then they measure people's diarrhea.

00:20:58.120 Like they actually measure like what kind of poops they're doing. And then Procter & Gamble is like,

00:21:03.520 uh these actually aren't like objectively speaking these aren't diarrhea poops oh jesus so it's like

00:21:08.860 this weird thing where it's like people report that they're having diarrhea like it feels to

00:21:13.780 people like they're having diarrhea but it's like it's not actually they're not losing water to the 0.99

00:21:18.840 extent that you do with sort of actual like evacuatory diarrhea stuff i fucking hate this 0.92

00:21:24.660 this is the part this is the part of the episode i've been dreading getting to 0.89

00:21:31.360 that like is it diarrhea or not section i was like man mike's doing pretty well with this amount

00:21:37.400 of poop talk i am pulled up into a ball my my hand is over my forehead just rocking yeah

00:21:43.920 oh buddy i'm so sorry so this is basically the debate like this is the data that we have in 1996

00:21:52.260 when there's all of this debate going on there's also this is hella sketchy one of procter and

00:21:58.080 Gamble's competitors, Unilever, they do their own tests on Olestra and they put in petitions to the

00:22:06.500 FDA that 15 to 30 percent of their participants got BAMU symptoms when they were eating the

00:22:14.020 Olestra chips. So like this then becomes like this weird fight between multinational corporations.

00:22:19.560 About who has the least gastrointestinal symptoms.

00:22:23.120 Yeah. Unilever doesn't want this to get approved because they don't have the same thing. They have

00:22:26.960 their own fat substitutes that they want to get approved. This is like professional wrestling or

00:22:31.440 something. It's so bad. I know. Basically, this all comes to a head in 1995 that we're now on

00:22:36.300 year eight of this approval process. And Procter & Gamble starts putting out all of these news

00:22:42.080 stories and sort of think tank reports about how long this approval process has been. So there's

00:22:48.440 infamously a House hearing in 1995 about U.S. regulatory processes and like how long it takes

00:22:56.680 to get approvals. And the entire hearing is just an excuse to bash the FDA for taking so long

00:23:03.020 to approve Olestra. Wow. They managed to turn this into a news story of like, oh, you know,

00:23:08.300 it's big government out of control. You know, we have this cure for the obesity epidemic right in

00:23:12.660 front of us and the FDA refuses to approve it. That's also so tricky because I can like a nine

00:23:20.200 year process slash 30 year process. Yeah. That's a very, very, very long and onerous time. And

00:23:26.660 it does sort of assure that only extraordinarily resourced corporations can like get through the

00:23:32.600 process. Exactly. Turning it into a media story is so disingenuous and shitty. Yeah. And so at the

00:23:39.500 end of 1995, there's the sort of the FDA's committee on approving food additives meets

00:23:46.080 and it votes 17 to 5 to approve Olestra. Whoa. So this is fascinating. This is from the actual

00:23:53.340 Federal Registry, the actual document that summarizes the reasons for its decision.

00:23:57.500 It says, the committee concluded that consumption of Olestra causes gastrointestinal effects

00:24:03.460 such as loose stools, abdominal cramping, and diarrhea-like symptoms.

00:24:07.520 However, the committee concluded that while Olestra caused these symptoms, there was no

00:24:12.520 evidence that these effects represented adverse health consequences.

00:24:16.160 So basically, we think that it is causing BAMU stuff, but the BAMU stuff isn't serious.

00:24:24.080 And so there's no reason not to approve this.

00:24:27.000 Weird.

00:24:27.420 Yes. 0.94

00:24:27.800 That's so shitty to just be like, well, I mean, seems like it, but we don't have enough proof. 0.91

00:24:33.000 So here we go. 0.95

00:24:34.340 Exactly.

00:24:35.180 The compromise agreement that they come up with is that they will approve Olestra, but

00:24:41.360 any products containing olestra have to include a warning label and so i'm gonna send this to you

00:24:49.460 hang on oh yay i feel like now that you're saying this i absolutely remember that there was a warning

00:24:56.400 label remember and it was the anal leakage warning label right like that's where that language

00:25:01.940 became popularized right uh read this one out loud okay this product contains olestra olestra

00:25:09.920 may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools loose stools well lestra inhibits the absorption

00:25:15.620 of some vitamins and other nutrients vitamins a d e and k have been added holy shit i did not

00:25:21.440 realize they just like put it on the packaging yep like the vitamin absorption stuff got lost in a 0.95

00:25:27.240 torrential downpour of poop jokes well that's the thing i mean when you've got poop jokes sitting

00:25:32.500 right there it's hard to focus on vitamin a d you know in jay leno's defense there's more jokes in

00:25:39.400 the poop stuff than there is in the vitamins yeah that's right god that's so surprising it's so

00:25:45.720 different than i thought i remembered it i mean it still says loose stools yeah gross it's pretty

00:25:50.620 bad yeah so this is one of the compromises that pocter and gamble had to make to sell these chips

00:25:57.040 they had to have the warning label the fda also required them to do a bunch of post-market research

00:26:02.180 so after this was on the market and you know millions of people were eating these chips

00:26:05.780 They would have to come back 30 months later to test, like, are there actually more of

00:26:10.940 these BOMU symptoms in the population as a whole?

00:26:13.560 So the FDA requires them to do more studies, essentially.

00:26:16.900 And they require them to fortify all of these foods with extra vitamins to account for all

00:26:22.520 the vitamins that you're losing from eating them.

00:26:24.260 Yeah, which was also sort of like, I felt sort of inured to that in the 90s because

00:26:28.880 there was all this talk about fortified breakfast cereals, right?

00:26:32.900 Yes.

00:26:33.260 Corn Flakes had like X number of vitamins and minerals added or whatever.

00:26:38.340 I just always sort of as a kid assumed that that was sort of like a generally altruistic endeavor. 0.98

00:26:45.080 You also thought that Procter & Gamble, out of the goodness of its heart, was like, this might make you shit yourself.

00:26:51.560 Yeah, I mean, I didn't have any sense of regulatory mechanisms. 0.92

00:26:56.580 You're like, Coca-Cola wants what's best for me.

00:26:58.660 I've seen those Santa ads.

00:26:59.880 They're making Diet Coke, and it's delicious, and it's a lot of what I drink in seventh grade.

00:27:04.720 Yeah.

00:27:05.020 Okay, so it is now 1996.

00:27:08.420 Olestra has been approved with these weird caveats, and this now becomes a marketing story.

00:27:15.620 Because, you know, Americans have been following this Olestra story vaguely.

00:27:19.220 You know, there's been news reports.

00:27:20.260 There's been all this stuff about the hearings and not getting approved, etc.

00:27:23.660 But most Americans don't really know about this.

00:27:26.400 So Procter & Gamble has to do all of this sort of consumer education about these miracle new potato chips.

00:27:34.600 They license the Olestra technology to Frito-Lay, which comes out with these Lay's Wow chips.

00:27:42.600 And they start testing them in a couple of cities.

00:27:45.980 And then they eventually expand the test markets to Ohio and Indiana for Lay's Wow chips and fat-free Pringles.

00:27:54.220 So these are sort of America's first introduction to Olestra.

00:27:58.660 So we are going to watch an ad for Lay's Wow Chips.

00:28:04.360 Oh, delightful.

00:28:05.800 It's lit.

00:28:11.080 Remember the simple pleasures of being a kid?

00:28:15.220 They're back.

00:28:16.380 Now you can eat like a kid again when all you cared about was taste.

00:28:19.840 Introducing new Lay's Wow Potato Chips.

00:28:22.140 They taste just as good as regular Lay's.

00:28:24.400 And because they're made with Olean, they're half the calories and 100% fat free.

00:28:28.680 Dad, how are we going to get home?

00:28:31.200 You know, son, you worry too much.

00:28:34.240 New Lay's wow.

00:28:35.420 Life tastes good again.

00:28:38.000 See?

00:28:39.280 Woof.

00:28:40.020 They cut out the part where Dad ate an edible before that.

00:28:44.600 So they are in this ad.

00:28:46.980 You see a kid sort of float by on a river on a sunny day.

00:28:51.360 the kid is sort of laying in the middle of an inner tube and then you see an adult float by

00:28:57.800 the adult is holding a bag that says what does it say fat free all the flavor or something like that

00:29:05.980 yeah that's a weird ad that the angle that they would take is like remember childhood

00:29:10.320 remember how you thought about food in childhood there's i mean i watched a bunch of other ones

00:29:14.980 to the the main sort of message seems to be like you can eat as much of this as you want and this

00:29:21.620 is sort of a safe food to eat like it's very similar to other diet marketing although what

00:29:27.320 did you think of the presentation of olestra in that ad uh i think it's smart to present it as

00:29:32.120 brand name olene because i think that makes more intuitive sense right like it's got the word lean

00:29:36.380 in it there you go good job marketing again like i feel really stuck on this idea of like i don't

00:29:42.160 feel like i see a lot of diet marketing that is like remember how you used to just eat and not

00:29:47.740 think about it yeah like that's a really fascinating angle to take it also feels like

00:29:53.880 a relatively light touch on the olestra end of things this is even okay this is even more obvious

00:29:59.760 in another ad because alongside the ad for sort of specific chips like fat-free pringles and stuff

00:30:06.000 they're also doing ads for olene as an ingredient so there's like a separate campaign like full

00:30:12.560 page ads in the new york times and stuff about like there's this new thing called olene and

00:30:17.480 it's amazing so we're gonna watch an olene ad oh that starts running at the same time all right

00:30:23.300 here we go i remember the day came to our farm just before harvest time

00:30:33.940 he introduced himself we talked some he told me about something never been done before

00:30:42.080 how soybeans like mine were now being used for a new kind of cooking oil

00:30:46.280 it seems the folks who make crisco had come up with olene an oil that fries up snacks without

00:30:52.940 adding any fat or calories make them taste specially good so i told him that sounds all right

00:31:01.340 And now I see what I'm part of, and it makes me feel good.

00:31:04.840 Coming soon from the makers of Crisco, New Fat Frioline, a good place to start.

00:31:10.520 I feel like at the end of that, they should just play like, and I'm proud to be an American.

00:31:17.220 Like it looks like a political ad from the mid-90s, right?

00:31:21.600 It really does.

00:31:22.160 I'm just a homespun farmer growing soybeans, a thing that most Americans at this point don't really understand what they are or what they do

00:31:30.060 or how they work or what they're in.

00:31:31.860 I'm just a real American worrying about fat and calories on my ranch.

00:31:35.880 Totally, totally.

00:31:37.460 I'm just your farmer grandpa.

00:31:39.800 That's so fascinating to me that so much of this was so, like, wholesome, all-American.

00:31:46.800 I can't fathom a diet food being marketed that way now.

00:31:51.020 It's such a weird move to me to have this thing that is created through, like, food science,

00:31:56.580 in labs, and technology.

00:31:58.420 it's like the least natural thing imaginable and yet they're like now i'm just a country folk trying

00:32:05.660 to eat some chips yeah it's like someone came to my ranch and he told me that my soybeans

00:32:10.060 were now going to be used for like a different kind of chip i don't think they do that well and

00:32:15.800 the idea that like frito-lay is like using the work of like family farmers do you know what i

00:32:21.780 mean like no no no this is the thing it's like it is very political campaign in that sort of the

00:32:27.100 family farmer quote unquote which almost does not exist in the united states like the number of

00:32:32.640 actual sort of what we think of as family farmers are all but non-existent but like this trope

00:32:39.300 survives in political campaigns and like when they need whitewashing for extremely chemically

00:32:46.360 processed ingredients they're like we better truck out the family farmer right they're like

00:32:52.000 we just go to the olestra farm where we farm frankenstein's molecule like just like they're

00:33:00.160 trying to win over the public to a new sort of substance that could right totally reasonably

00:33:06.660 freak people out because they know that they also have to say that it causes loose stools and

00:33:11.980 abdominal cramping i know real americans real americans don't get downstairs liquid problems

00:33:18.520 And if we do, it's from Buffalo Wings.

00:33:21.540 Yeah.

00:33:22.020 Like God intended.

00:33:23.620 There's also, okay, this is the really predictable part.

00:33:26.860 There's also a years-long campaign by Procter & Gamble to court media figures, academics, and like doctors and stuff.

00:33:37.080 Uh-huh.

00:33:37.440 You know, the American Medical Association puts out a statement supportive of Olestra, but doesn't mention that it's also negotiating an $800,000 donation from Procter & Gamble at the same time.

00:33:50.420 What?

00:33:51.100 Yeah, they also fund a bunch of, you know, academic conferences and, you know, medical professionals.

00:33:58.880 And Jeffrey Steingarten talks about how they sent little sort of tinfoil packets of chips, actual chips, to hundreds of newspaper editors across the country.

00:34:10.300 Like, this just is a full court press.

00:34:13.220 God, I mean, like, it makes sense, right?

00:34:15.160 Like, that is how you market things, right?

00:34:17.520 Yeah.

00:34:17.720 You and I get emails about this where people are like, do you want to try our CBD gummies and review them on our show?

00:34:23.500 Do you want to try this thing?

00:34:24.660 Do you want to try that thing?

00:34:25.980 And like that's how you get people on board is go, here are a bunch of trusted voices.

00:34:31.060 They say this is fine.

00:34:32.300 It's totally fine.

00:34:33.500 Yes.

00:34:33.940 This is a excerpt from a Mother Jones article about this full court press.

00:34:38.500 It says,

00:34:39.480 Louie Sullivan, a former Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA,

00:34:44.780 has addressed press conferences and written letters to the editor on behalf of Olestra.

00:34:50.060 Rarely is it noted that he also works as a paid Procter & Gamble consultant.

00:34:55.040 In one dispatch to the New York Times,

00:34:56.900 Sullivan, identified only as the president of Morehouse's School of Medicine, said,

00:35:01.420 Americans can feel confident in the safety of snacks made with Olestra.

00:35:05.820 So, you know, they're not like straightforward, like we will pay you money if you say these things.

00:35:12.300 Yeah.

00:35:12.620 But it's just like everything is just a little bit borderline.

00:35:15.860 Yeah, it doesn't rise to the level of like the green coffee bean extract guy on Dr. Oz, but it's like riding a line.

00:35:23.940 There's actually an article that comes out in the early 2000s where this is a dope methodology.

00:35:29.120 They actually go through every single author who wrote a paper on Olestra, like all these

00:35:35.120 scientific literature, weight loss literature, BAMU stuff literature, and they look into

00:35:40.900 how many of these people have financial relationships with Procter & Gamble.

00:35:45.440 And of the supportive articles, like the articles that find no effect of Olestra, Olestra is

00:35:50.440 chill, 80% of the authors of those papers had at least one financial interaction with

00:35:57.160 Procter & Gamble.

00:35:57.980 Again, you can't draw these like very clean lines.

00:36:01.900 Like there's not necessarily like brown envelopes of cash trading hands.

00:36:05.840 And you could just as easily say that Procter & Gamble is seeking out researchers who are doing research, finding good things about Alestra and paying them afterwards.

00:36:14.820 The causal relationship doesn't necessarily go only in the one direction.

00:36:18.680 Right.

00:36:19.100 But it is just like worth noting.

00:36:20.340 Yeah.

00:36:20.840 And that sort of failure to disclose part makes it seem fishier.

00:36:25.800 Yeah.

00:36:25.980 To be like, oh, they paid me money, but I'm not going to talk about that.

00:36:29.620 I'm just going to talk about how great their products are.

00:36:32.080 Like, this is like Instagram ads, right?

00:36:34.640 You have to add like hashtag ad.

00:36:37.060 And this feels like it's missing the hashtag ad part of it.

00:36:40.220 Just what it shows to me is how deeply embedded in the food science field the food companies are.

00:36:47.540 There's a really interesting passage in Marion Nestle's book where she says, like, I have gotten money from Procter & Gamble.

00:36:53.240 Basically, if you attend food conferences, if you speak at things, if you talk at universities, if you basically work in this field, it is almost impossible to not have some financial relationship with Procter & Gamble and Unilever and all the other ones because they're always the ones funding these things.

00:37:12.060 This is a real, like, no ethical consumption under capitalism moment, right?

00:37:16.080 Like, there's no way for this to be clean and tidy for kind of anybody or for kind of any industry, right?

00:37:22.800 Like, particularly when folks don't disclose.

00:37:26.020 Exactly. Yeah.

00:37:27.520 So we now come to the downfall of Olestra.

00:37:31.880 I am so fascinated by this.

00:37:33.260 I don't actually know anything about how or why or when it came off the shelves.

00:37:38.700 It just sort of was there and then it wasn't.

00:37:40.960 It was there much longer than anybody realizes because what happened is Olestra stayed on the shelves, but the warning label disappeared.

00:37:50.020 What?

00:37:50.440 So we get to – in 1998, the product goes national.

00:37:54.500 So they've done these test markets.

00:37:56.220 They then launched the thing nationally.

00:37:57.820 They run all of these ads.

00:37:59.640 And it sells somewhere around $400 million the first year.

00:38:03.920 And they're expecting that to rise to $1.5 billion.

00:38:06.880 but then within two years it's down to 200 million oh there's a couple reasons for the collapse the

00:38:15.080 first is that because they're a little bit harder to make and there's all these sort of there's

00:38:18.780 extra steps in the industrial processes to make fat-free pringles they're more expensive

00:38:23.720 there's also steingarten talks about the chips might not have been that good apparently they

00:38:30.040 left a sort of film on the roof of your mouth kind of like a noticeable aftertaste like greasiness

00:38:36.440 fundamentally you're paying more for a product that isn't as good right this is a little bit

00:38:42.060 like when um i think it was probably like five years ago when stevia started showing up and

00:38:47.080 everything and people were like yeah it's natural it's sweet but it's not sugar and it's actually

00:38:51.440 sweeter than sugar and blah blah blah and people were like oh it seems good and like bought a ton

00:38:55.560 of like whatever with stevia in it at costco yeah and burnt themselves out on it and then realized

00:39:02.220 oh, wait, there is this sort of aftertaste. It's just sort of like genuine consumer feedback,

00:39:07.700 it sounds like, is sort of what led to this kind of deflation. Yeah.

00:39:10.980 And also timing that, you know, remember Snackwell's cookies peaked in 1995. And then by

00:39:16.840 1999, they were basically over. Oh, Lestra comes out in 1998. So we're at this sort of this rapid

00:39:24.460 collapse of the fat free consumer product market, right? We're starting to get rid of these all

00:39:31.000 these weird processed products and we're starting to discover Atkins. Like that's the fad diet that

00:39:35.380 we find a couple of years later. There's also the thing, I mean, you can dive into the sort of the

00:39:41.280 price data and the taste data and whatever, but also fundamentally to me anyway, we're talking 0.96

00:39:47.700 about a product that has a warning label saying you might shit yourself. Like I think some of the

00:39:54.400 sort of optimistic projections are like, are you kidding me? No other food at the grocery store

00:40:00.840 has a sign on it that says you might shit yourself like there's a significant chance 0.96

00:40:05.440 you're going to shit yourself like that kind of matters well and also no product has that sign 0.92

00:40:11.560 and no product has been required to have that sign exactly it also seems like extraordinarily 0.99

00:40:18.220 predictable that this would be the kind of sort of like late night comedy fodder that it became

00:40:24.780 oh yeah right i mean that's the thing it's like a lot of these unfortunately a lot of these jokes

00:40:28.920 are like lost to time but i remember as a kid olestra jokes were everywhere like it was a

00:40:33.840 national laughing stock yes there's also the sort of the debate over the side effects of olestra

00:40:40.160 because olestra has now been on the market for two years it's available to all americans and 0.97

00:40:46.980 we can finally kind of answer the question does olestra cause you to shit yourself and this puts

00:40:55.100 me in grave danger of like being canceled on my own podcast but looking at all of the data all 0.99

00:41:03.240 of the information that we have about this the thing of olestra making you shit yourself i have

00:41:08.580 to say is kind of an urban legend really the only actual evidence of olestra causing all of this

00:41:16.740 bammu distress is right after they hit the market in 1996 the center for science in the public

00:41:22.940 interest sets up a hotline where people can call in and report any symptoms that they have as a

00:41:30.260 result of eating Olestra. So they, you know, they get reports of people saying like, I thought I

00:41:35.480 was going to die. Another one says it was like childbirth. The Center for Science in the Public

00:41:41.180 Interest says to this day that they and the FDA received more complaints about Olestra than any

00:41:46.860 other food additive in history whoa yes so they have this voluminous amount of complaints about

00:41:54.280 you know people who ate olester chips and had these horrific experiences however this being 0.91

00:41:59.860 a show of two methodology queens it is worth noting that like this is an extremely shitty

00:42:05.720 methodology right you're basing this completely on anonymous phone calls and you're not actually

00:42:10.720 verifying anything well this is also a little bit like when uh in like a given episode of law and

00:42:17.380 order when they're like we have to move the trial to a different town because the jury pool is so

00:42:23.800 tainted by media coverage of it right right this is all happening at a time when at least once a

00:42:30.220 day someone in your earshot is making a joke about olestra and shitting yourself exactly to its great

00:42:37.280 credit, CSPI did an actual sort of scientific phone survey of people who had symptoms, you know,

00:42:44.260 after eating Olestra. And they found that 78% had seen negative stories about Olestra in the press.

00:42:51.900 Part of this is like people are being primed to attribute any stomach ache, anything that they had

00:42:58.120 to the Olestra chips that they ate maybe an hour ago, maybe five days ago. It's really hard to

00:43:03.340 disentangle this from the fact that like, yes, there were late night jokes about this. And there

00:43:06.600 with a fucking warning label on the package saying you might shit yourself. 1.00

00:43:10.480 Right. 1.00

00:43:10.720 So alongside the CSPI hotline, Procter & Gamble also sets up a hotline.

00:43:17.100 So on the bag of chips, it will say, you know, if you have any questions about this product,

00:43:20.820 if you want to report any problems with this product, call like whatever, 1-800-BOMU stuff,

00:43:25.600 like whatever it was, it was some hotline number, right?

00:43:27.920 And so Procter & Gamble also got, they got 15,000 calls, which CSPI and others say like,

00:43:34.180 oh my god they're getting all these complaints like a flood of complaints but according to

00:43:37.660 procter and gamble only nine percent of those are actually complaints the rest of them are just like 0.99

00:43:41.920 requests for information you know where do i buy these in my town like kind of random ass shit 0.86

00:43:46.060 and they've published the data from all of these calls that they get to the hotline and what's 0.97

00:43:50.460 really interesting is the calls the sort of the complaints to the hotline spike after the chips

00:43:56.720 are introduced in the test market and there's like a wave of marketing and a wave of news stories

00:44:01.860 like hey this weird technological ingredient is coming onto the market and then they taper off

00:44:07.300 very quickly but that doesn't actually track with sales because right when the products are

00:44:13.540 introduced the sales are relatively low and then sales increase over time but the calls completely

00:44:19.900 taper off so if you had people who were actually shitting themselves based on eating these chips

00:44:25.900 you would have calls to the hotline rising as sales of the chips rise and you don't see that

00:44:31.040 pattern, you see the spike around media coverage of Olestra, not sales of Olestra.

00:44:36.400 Right. I could also see that that wave of calls, like the same kind of person who would call a

00:44:42.740 Procter & Gamble hotline would be the first person in their town to try a new kind of chip

00:44:49.200 and sort of pride themselves on it, right? So that's like more a measure of sort of like

00:44:52.900 how are early adopters responding to this than it is about like, what's the effect of this food?

00:44:58.820 Right. We should be careful. These are all Procter & Gamble studies, right? So just on their face, we should be skeptical of this. But the information that Procter & Gamble publishes is that another thing that shows up in the reports on the hotline is that people will say, I ate these Olester chips at noon and I was like shitting myself by two.

00:45:17.760 and that isn't something that showed up in any of the clinical data or any of the sort of double

00:45:23.800 blind placebo tests that they had done while they were developing the chips so all of the symptoms

00:45:30.620 take two or three days to happen like it has to kind of build up in your system and you have to

00:45:35.640 eat like a can of pringles every day and then by day three or four you're reporting that you have

00:45:41.360 diarrhea but you're not getting that like an hour later because that's like physically impossible

00:45:45.160 because it takes a long time for the sort of the fat to get through your large intestine so a lot

00:45:51.240 of the complaints that people are reporting are like basically impossible and there's also no

00:45:55.480 relationship between vulnerable groups and olastro side effects so among the population you would

00:46:02.700 expect elderly people and children to have much greater likelihood of symptoms because they have

00:46:08.100 just kind of weaker guts generally and yet the complaints to procter and gamble are like very

00:46:13.040 evenly distributed throughout the population.

00:46:15.940 Huh.

00:46:16.520 Procter & Gamble also does a thing where they recruit people who complained about the gastrointestinal

00:46:24.020 symptoms.

00:46:24.480 So they get all these complaints, they get people's contact information, and they get

00:46:28.020 100 people.

00:46:29.500 And Procter & Gamble does this sort of double-blind, placebo-controlled study where they give half

00:46:34.920 of them chips every day.

00:46:36.580 And what they find after eight weeks is that there's no difference between Olestra and

00:46:41.560 the placebo group.

00:46:42.680 Jesus.

00:46:43.520 So again, we want to be careful because this is Procter & Gamble designing the study, right?

00:46:47.120 And companies lie.

00:46:48.000 So, you know, we don't want to sort of give Procter & Gamble all of the credit.

00:46:51.360 But again, on its face, this seems like a pretty good way of testing.

00:46:55.240 Well, systemically, Procter & Gamble is doing this.

00:46:58.720 But so far, that's the only research we have access to.

00:47:02.980 Exactly.

00:47:03.540 Which is a problem.

00:47:04.780 Which is systemically a problem.

00:47:07.100 Absolutely.

00:47:07.940 No question.

00:47:09.120 I know.

00:47:09.360 So you kind of got to go on what you got.

00:47:11.020 or make like major systemic reforms that will take decades go right so i mean this is not a

00:47:18.080 like proctor and gamble stan episode or like it's you know olestra is a maligned figure from the 0.77

00:47:24.100 1990s i do not give a shit like i yeah i have no interest in like defending olestra i'd be like 0.95

00:47:29.980 bring it back like it never got approved actually in canada the uk or the eu and like i don't give 0.98

00:47:36.960 a shit like they have not been deprived of anything like we'll get into the sort of broader 0.94

00:47:42.220 structural reasons why olestra is trash but like there's no sort of smoking gun of like people 0.99

00:47:48.540 actually having these symptoms and it took me a long time to sort of believe procter and gamble

00:47:53.080 because this is what procter and gamble has always said is that on any given month 40 percent of

00:47:59.560 Americans have gastrointestinal symptoms. Yeah. Abdominal cramping, diarrhea, sort of feeling

00:48:06.360 bad in your BAMU. And it's very difficult to sort of trace these things back to one thing that you

00:48:13.180 ate. Basically, to me, it's the central reason why Olestra never should have been approved in

00:48:17.360 the first place, because it's impossible to untangle the effect of the chips from just the

00:48:22.400 population having gastrointestinal issues generally. Yeah, totally. I mean, like, this is

00:48:27.020 also how we get Whole30 and like elimination diets broadly. This idea that like, if I feel

00:48:34.740 bad, it must be because of a food. I just have to figure out which food and stop eating that food

00:48:39.900 when there's still so much that we don't know about digestion and about what causes

00:48:47.440 gastrointestinal distress. It's a fiction that we keep chasing without really a whole lot of

00:48:53.520 evidence to to back it up well this is why one of the most fascinating studies on this was this is

00:48:58.260 also a procter and campbell study so grains of salt but they basically set up this thing in a

00:49:02.640 movie theater where they said hey come and watch a movie you get all you can eat chips so basically

00:49:08.160 when you come in you get like a can of fucking pringles and they give you like as many pringles 0.98

00:49:12.420 as you want so some people are eating a little some people are eating a lot and then afterwards 0.98

00:49:15.660 they measure people's gastrointestinal symptoms so it is true that of the people who went to this

00:49:22.220 movie theater test and who ate olestra chips 16 of them had various gastrointestinal issues

00:49:29.280 afterwards do you want to know what percentage of people had gastrointestinal issues after eating

00:49:35.000 normal chips 16 18 so it's one of those things we're like yes olestra causes problems but maybe

00:49:43.180 all of the other stuff causes problems too like it just all causes problems this is like very

00:49:49.300 genuinely blowing my mind isn't it what me too it's like very genuinely blowing my mind it's

00:49:53.900 what's happening right now so basically brass tacks my read of the entire situation from

00:49:59.460 everything that i read from the federal documents to various independent studies that have come out

00:50:03.800 since all of this controversy is basically if you eat like a decent amount of olestra foods like a

00:50:11.860 can of Pringles every single day, after three or four days, there's about a 20% chance that you'll

00:50:19.800 get like some BAMU symptom. For the majority of people, it's going to be something relatively

00:50:25.320 minor, like farting, like you're going to fart more. Or like one of them was like pooping frequency,

00:50:30.460 like you're going to poop more. But there's a small percentage of that small percentage is

00:50:34.960 going to get things that are more irritating, like abdominal cramping or diarrhea. And there's

00:50:40.900 a couple of extremely isolated, extremely anecdotal cases of people with severe, like

00:50:46.600 requiring hospitalization symptoms. But those are so rare that when they happen, like there's an

00:50:53.420 entire journal article about them. So there's literally a journal article about two children

00:50:58.380 that had like severe gastrointestinal distress after eating Olestra, but they were also taking

00:51:04.140 Orlistat at the same time. Oh God. Yeah. It's not, it's not clear like how those things were

00:51:09.000 interacting, but it's like, in extremely rare cases, it sounds like something super severe can

00:51:15.040 happen. And that's like, Olestra, famously sort of a diarrhea factory, and Orlistat, also famously

00:51:23.840 a diarrhea factory, right? That's a pretty unique situation, right? That's not a clean read on just

00:51:28.900 Olestra or just Orlistat. Right. I mean, that seems to be sort of like the overall state of

00:51:34.660 the data. Although we should also note a very important caveat that of course Procter & Gamble

00:51:39.240 does not bring up themselves is that Olestra was not designed to just be in chips. Like the vision

00:51:45.760 of Olestra was that it would be all over the US food supply, right? Like the plan was to have this

00:51:52.020 in cookies, to have this in breads, to have this in like crackers. Like there was Olestra wheat

00:51:57.480 thins at one point. They were going to have like restaurants using it. So the idea of like if you

00:52:03.180 eat reasonably large portions of this every single day, you're going to get symptoms.

00:52:08.140 Well, the idea was for all of us to be eating quite a bit of this. Like that was the vision

00:52:12.480 at the end of the rainbow. So if 20% of the population is getting some form of distress,

00:52:19.640 if the food supply had started incorporating this more, we all would have been eating moderate

00:52:23.860 amounts of it at some point. Like this was never going to be sustainable.

00:52:27.440 Right. So like the volume of poop jokes that we got about Olestra was maybe sort of jumping the gun, right? Like was not borne out by the data that we had, but it would have been borne out by the sort of vision for Olestra.

00:52:42.860 Yeah. The poop jokes were a warning to us all.

00:52:45.360 The canary in the poop coal mine?

00:52:47.200 Yes.

00:52:47.560 In the poop mine?

00:52:48.260 but then what's so interesting is you know all of the debate around olestra generally in the

00:52:55.240 literature is around does it cause bamu explosions or not but there's the much bigger question about

00:53:01.380 olestra is does it help people to lose weight or not like the entire justification for olestra was

00:53:06.480 supposed to be it helps people lose weight so one of the only studies i found that actually tests

00:53:12.780 olestra for weight loss they tested olestra versus a reduced fat diet versus a control diet and they

00:53:19.800 found that olestra was significantly better than the reduced fat diet huh but of course as we

00:53:27.180 always do on this show you have to zoom in on the actual results so people who were on the reduced

00:53:31.620 fat diet lost six pounds and people who were on the olestra diet lost 10 pounds this was over 10

00:53:36.460 weeks yeah so you know six pounds 10 pounds like it's all pretty modest but then as soon as i saw

00:53:42.460 this, I was so excited to tell you about it because of course this gets written up in the

00:53:45.940 press and you could find it like, oh my God, it turns out Alistair does work for weight loss.

00:53:49.220 But then you look at the actual specifics and there's only 15 people in the study,

00:53:54.660 first of all. So it's three groups of five people each.

00:54:00.540 That's a kindergarten classroom divided up into three different groups at playtime.

00:54:05.080 Yeah. This isn't in the abstract, but if you zoom in, like you actually

00:54:08.040 read the actual study, it notes that, you know, maybe the reason why people lost more weight on

00:54:15.460 the Olestra diet than the reduced fat diet is that everyone in the Olestra group was fat and

00:54:22.460 everyone in the reduced fat group was skinny. Ah, fuck off. So it's like, ah. Fuck off. Isn't this 1.00

00:54:30.440 the thing you're supposed to be measuring? Every fat person can tell you. And also like anyone who

00:54:36.820 understands arithmetic can tell you a smaller percentage of a fat person's body weighs more

00:54:43.840 than a larger percentage of a thin person you know what i mean like proportionately you may

00:54:48.500 be losing weight at the same kind of rate if you look at percentages which is a more meaningful

00:54:54.980 measure i would say than like straight up just like numerical pounds lost yes it seems like

00:55:02.520 you know we're gonna test whether tylenol helps with headaches and we're gonna split

00:55:06.760 people into groups and you know it really helps with this one group oh it turns out people in one

00:55:11.240 group had headaches and the people in the other group didn't have headaches it's like well you

00:55:15.460 can't have that as a variable i will say this is also like a bizarro gripe that i sort of have with

00:55:21.600 weight loss world broadly right aside from like bariatric weight loss surgeries there's not really

00:55:29.240 any distinguishing between like what kind of person does this help to lose weight under what

00:55:35.860 circumstances, right? Like the number of well-intented and terrible thin women who have 1.00

00:55:42.980 come up to me and been like, I lost like 20 pounds on this thing. You should totally try it, 1.00

00:55:47.800 right? Where I'm like, oh, you don't have any sense of the mechanics of losing 150 pounds.

00:55:53.660 Yes. So basically the studies on Olestra for weight loss are, you know, as inconclusive as

00:55:58.840 they are for every other thing for weight loss. Like it works in the short term or maybe it

00:56:02.580 doesn't and some studies find it and some studies don't but the the mechanism behind this appears

00:56:07.820 to be this idea of the compensation effect that most famously with artificial sweeteners when you

00:56:15.040 give people a diet coke they'll just drink more because they're like oh well there's no sugar in

00:56:19.520 it so i can drink more of it and so the idea is that when people know that their food has a luster

00:56:23.840 in it and there's no fat and no calories then they're just going to end up eating more and

00:56:28.200 they do actually find this in rat studies when they give them like little rat pringles they'll

00:56:34.640 compensate like they'll eat i think it's like exactly 35 percent more to compensate for the

00:56:39.740 fact that they have 35 fewer calories like in this kind of exact one-to-one way but the human

00:56:45.880 literature and i i like that the literature mentions this that humans don't eat for the

00:56:51.340 same reason that rats do right like we're not just seeking homeostasis we eat for social reasons we

00:56:56.420 eat for emotional reasons. We eat because we're bored. We eat for a million reasons not related

00:57:00.740 to our sort of hunger and satiety signals. And so in humans, the research is kind of all over

00:57:06.080 the place. Some studies find like there's one study that finds if you eat whatever bread made

00:57:11.220 with Olestra for breakfast, you'll compensate by eating more at dinner. Like there's some studies

00:57:16.960 that find this. There's weird buffet studies that don't find a compensation effect. It seems to

00:57:21.880 really depend on the method that you're using to measure the compensation effect and sort of like

00:57:27.100 the day-to-day stuff. And this stuff is really hard to measure too because people know they're

00:57:30.460 in a study. But it seems to be that people don't compensate calories if they don't know that

00:57:38.840 they're eating Olestra chips. So if you give people like Olestra foods and you're just like,

00:57:43.800 here's some foods, people will actually reduce their calorie consumption. But if you give them

00:57:49.160 Lester foods and you're like, hey, here's some foods with fewer calories and less fat,

00:57:53.560 they will actually compensate because they know they're eating less at the initial meal

00:57:57.320 with a Lester in it.

00:57:58.240 Uh-huh.

00:57:59.060 And I think I would imagine that folks have been sort of burned so many times by diet

00:58:05.580 foods or like have a sort of lived experience, right, with lower fat.

00:58:09.680 Like there is now an existing expectation that it will be less satisfying, that you

00:58:15.280 will need more later.

00:58:16.520 Exactly. When you market something as a diet food, I would imagine that it would be sort of teeing folks up psychologically to preemptively feel unsatisfied.

00:58:26.520 Right. I mean, you find these articles that say like, well, there's no compensation effect for Olestra and it only happens if people know they're eating Olestra.

00:58:34.000 So there's no compensation. And it's like, well, under what scenario would somebody trying to lose weight not know that they're eating Olestra?

00:58:42.300 Like if you're eating it, you're buying it at the store and you're buying it at the store because you know about it.

00:58:47.100 Yeah.

00:58:47.380 Again, this isn't like some footnote.

00:58:49.740 It's like a central issue in the research that if you know you're eating diet foods, they don't have a diet effect on you.

00:58:57.220 Right.

00:58:57.540 So like at the population level, if we wanted to like make America lose weight using Olestra, somehow you'd have to put this into our food without telling us?

00:59:05.040 Is it then just, like, you set up, like, a box with a stick propping it up and, like, put chips, like, a dish of chips in it and then, like, a fat person comes along and you, like, pull the string on the stick and trap them in the box?

00:59:16.780 Like, what?

00:59:17.480 Exactly.

00:59:18.200 Mike, I feel like this is rearranging my brain around what I sort of thought I knew.

00:59:22.500 I know. Procter & Gamble is good.

00:59:24.320 Giant corporations, everything they do is fine.

00:59:26.520 Nope.

00:59:26.920 You know?

00:59:27.360 No, Mike, I'm out.

00:59:29.260 I'm back out.

00:59:30.380 Never mind. 1.00

00:59:30.900 It totally made you shit yourself. 1.00

00:59:32.120 I'm done. 1.00

00:59:32.440 I feel deeply weird about this episode and this conclusion, by the way.

00:59:36.120 It's totally weird.

00:59:37.500 This is a real history should make you feel weird moment.

00:59:40.980 Yes.

00:59:41.700 Do you want to get to the twist of the twist?

00:59:44.360 Oh my God, there's more twist?

00:59:46.480 Oh yeah.

00:59:46.960 Bring me more twist, Michael.

00:59:48.600 So these studies, all of this post-market testing stuff is how Procter & Gamble convinces the FDA to remove the warning label in 2003.

00:59:57.040 Uh-huh.

00:59:58.040 Oh, Lester stays on the market.

00:59:59.520 You know, it's in chips.

01:00:00.900 They rebrand Lay's wow chips as Lay's light.

01:00:04.360 But, you know, fat-free Pringles, Lay's chips, they're on the market for years.

01:00:08.140 It doesn't seem like they were ever big sellers.

01:00:10.080 It was never the sort of sensation that Procter & Gamble wanted it to be.

01:00:13.500 But it's just kind of quietly on the market for ages.

01:00:16.300 We actually tried to find Olester chips to eat for this episode and we could not find any.

01:00:21.400 Like you can find them on the sort of like the Walmart website or whatever, but they've

01:00:24.420 been sold out for ages.

01:00:25.740 So I think that's just kind of quietly faded from the market.

01:00:28.760 But one of the only independent studies that I found found that Olestra actually gives people less gastrointestinal symptoms than other food additives. 0.99

01:00:42.120 You shut the fuck up right now, Michael. 1.00

01:00:44.380 Fucking bananas. 1.00

01:00:46.020 So do you remember our old friend from the Halo Top episode, Sorbitol? 0.99

01:00:51.020 I sure do.

01:00:51.920 Researchers did a double-blind placebo-controlled study where they gave people doses of Sorbitol, doses of Olestra, and doses of placebo.

01:01:01.340 And this is a quote from the article.

01:01:03.520 People who ate Sorbitol 40 grams a day had liquid-slash-loose stools within one to three hours of consumption.

01:01:11.940 Olestra consumption, at levels far in excess of normal snacking conditions,

01:01:16.780 resulted in a gradual stool softening effect after several days of consumption,

01:01:21.220 did not meet any of the three objective measures of diarrhea,

01:01:24.400 and did not increase gastrointestinal symptoms. 0.68

01:01:27.360 Olestra has this miserable reputation for causing people to shit themselves in Tower Records.

01:01:32.860 Other food additives actually have worse effects, like objectively worse effects,

01:01:38.020 but they haven't been subject to the same amount of media scrutiny.

01:01:40.440 Right. The stuff that's in Halo Top is xylitol and this one's sorbitol, but they're both sugar alcohols, which are in everything right now. And there is broad research on sugar alcohols that upholds this idea that like, if you eat more than a little bit of any kind of sugar alcohol, like you are going to have some gastrointestinal stuff.

01:02:04.740 It'll also scramble your hunger cues, potentially.

01:02:08.800 There's research that suggests that that may be happening, right?

01:02:11.500 Like, it feels like we're in one of those moments where, like, there's an Olestra happening right now.

01:02:16.760 Yeah. 1.00

01:02:17.460 Woof!

01:02:18.300 Sorbitol does what we thought Olestra did.

01:02:21.400 And does it more acutely.

01:02:23.140 Yes.

01:02:23.720 Oh, Mike, I feel like I'm leaving the movie theater after seeing, like, The Witch or Hereditary.

01:02:30.680 You know what I mean? Where you're like, oh, this feels bad in a very sort of large scale kind of way.

01:02:38.120 Yes. Well, this is what's amazing to me is that the summing up, like the last thing to say about this is that none of this debunking is meant to be like, let's bring Olestra back. Olestra is good.

01:02:48.920 The problem with Olestra isn't the fact that it made people shit themselves. The problem with Olestra is that it never should have existed in the first place. 0.93

01:02:55.580 Like we're not going to have a technological solution to a political public health problem.

01:03:02.580 We're just not.

01:03:03.520 So the entire endeavor is just pointless.

01:03:06.740 Like why do we need a fake fat with zero calories and dubious long-term effects when like we can just do the things that we know are going to make people healthier now?

01:03:17.880 Subsidize fruits and vegetables.

01:03:19.520 Like make it more accessible for people.

01:03:21.780 Make it easier for people to walk and bike to work.

01:03:23.880 Like, these are the things that we talk about every single episode, and we're not doing those things.

01:03:28.540 Alestra also feels like a house that's built on a foundation of sand.

01:03:33.420 Yes.

01:03:33.680 It also was uncritically replicating and giving credence to the idea that dietary fat was what made people fat.

01:03:42.780 Yes.

01:03:43.120 Even more than that, the sand underneath that sand is there are too many fat people and there need to be less fat people.

01:03:49.920 again like i sort of fundamentally disagree with the idea that there's too much of a kind of person

01:03:55.540 there are plenty of health conditions that we can address there are plenty of like ways to get

01:03:59.720 around this stuff but like this just feels like a failure of both systems and of critical thinking

01:04:06.600 about cultural beliefs right yeah i feel like the stuff that i'm taking away from this episode are

01:04:12.380 a few things one this is what happens when you don't have systems set up for the sort of technology

01:04:18.580 that's coming down the pike, right?

01:04:20.460 This is also what happens when you have outdated policies

01:04:24.900 and policy structures for how things get on the market

01:04:28.920 and where the testing lives.

01:04:30.640 It's also what happens when ethics sort of take a backseat

01:04:35.120 to consumer behaviors or like the will of the market.

01:04:39.300 And it's what happens when we sort of like underestimate

01:04:42.860 the role that like art and comedy and media play

01:04:48.100 in the formation of our opinions of things, right?

01:04:50.780 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:51.600 My strongest memories of Lestra

01:04:54.640 are about the jokes about pooping yourself, right?

01:04:57.840 So, like, at some point,

01:04:59.220 it does sort of worm its way into your brain, right?

01:05:02.320 Right.

01:05:02.560 This is genuinely, like,

01:05:04.100 I'm going to be thinking and talking about this

01:05:05.560 for, like, a couple of weeks.

01:05:07.040 I would like to thank you

01:05:08.060 for making me more insufferable to my family.

01:05:11.240 It turns out all along,

01:05:12.820 this was a story about feeling weird in your upstairs.

01:05:18.100 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - April 13, 2021

Olestra

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