Maintenance Phase - Olestra

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

 In 1996, Proctor & Gamble launched an artificial fat substitute that promised all of the taste but none of the calories. There was just one problem. Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Marion Nestle’s The Selling of OlestraJeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate EverythingThe 1996 Federal RegisterThe Trouble With FriesReduction of the body burden of PCBs and DDE by dietary intervention in a randomized trialReview of the effects of dilution of dietary energy with olestra on energy intakeAuthors’ Financial Relationships With the Food and Beverage Industry and Their Published Positions on the Fat Substitute OlestraPostmarketing Surveillance of New Food Ingredients: Results from the Program with the Fat Replacer OlestraEffects of wheat bran and olestra on objective measures of stool and subjective reports of GI symptomsThe effect of ingesting olestra-based foods on feeding behavior and energy balance in humansEffect on Body Weight of Replacing Dietary Fat with Olestra for Two or Ten Weeks in Healthy Men and Women Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Faze, the podcast that keeps saying it doesn't want to talk about poop. Oh my god. But it's really like conceptually painted itself into a corner. Ha ha ha ha. I have spent the last three weeks livid about doing this episode, even though I don't know who I'm angry at. I'm just angry.

When you picked it, I was very surprised. I was like, the one that's famously poopy. The poop episode. Yes. I'm Aubrey Gordon, and I'm here with my co-host. Michael Hobbs. You can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. We also have t-shirts and masks and phone cases and tote bags and all kinds of stuff on

T-Public. Both of those are linked for your convenience at maintenancephase.com. You know what we don't have, Aubrey? Mmm. Fat free potato chips. Yeah! That make you feel weird in your downstairs. we don't have, Aubrey, fat-free potato chips. Yeah. That make you feel weird in your downstairs.

So can you tell me what you know about this ingredient, O'Lestra and the history of it? So O'Lestra, brand name O'Lean. Yes. Burst onto the market sometime in the mid 90s, right in the middle of my fat kid adolescents. What I remember most distinctly, they were wow potato chips from Frito Lay. Yes.

I don't know if I ever tried them, but I definitely remember feeling like this is for me. And of course, I remember non-stop jokes about the phrase anal leakage. Yes, this is my primary memory as well. Poop jokes, it's your nightmare. I know exactly. Poop jokes as far as the eye can see. This is where my trauma about this comes from. Yes.

That's about all I remember. OK, I'm super curious to hear about how it all has started. Yes, first we have to talk about it as a science story and then we have to talk about it as a science story, and then we have to talk about it as a politics story. Oh! So, O'Lester's actually a combination of oil and table sugar. What?

Yes, it was discovered by Proctor and Gamble in 1968 by accident. They were not looking for a fat that wasn't fat. They were actually looking for the exact opposite. So, they were working on baby foods that would actually absorb more calories. So they were doing all this weird, I don't understand how chemistry works, 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. And they came up with a small cuele that is sucrose polyester, and they tested it, not on babies, because that's super unethical, but I think on rats or something,

and they found out that it just went right through them. The rat became a straw, and so they were like, huh, there might be something here. I genuinely can't think of a bigger outrage factory than the concept of baby testing. I know exactly. Exactly. Some of the old research that you find on this

is like when they started testing it on babies, I'm like, they absolutely did not test this on babies. So like, and if they did, someone needs to work on a book about this. Whoa. The way that it works, basically you start with table sugar, normal ass table sugar, and vegetable oil.

And there are chemical processes that you can do to break the vegetable oil into its constituent parts. So you basically break off the fatty acids from the sort of backbone of the fat molecule. And then you take those fatty acids and I don't know, put them in a blender, I don't exactly know how this works, but you blend them with sugar. And so what happens when you put the whole thing back together is you end up with a fat molecule that is more than twice as big as an ordinary fat molecule. And nothing about that, like chemically, it can't be broken down by the bacteria in your small or your large intestine.

So it's essentially like if you swallowed like a pebble. Literally, one of the scientific papers I came across actually says it's the same reason we can't digest wood. So the central genius of Oedlestra is that to your gut it is wood, right? None of it gets absorbed and therefore none of the calories go into your body. Like it doesn't register as calories, but to your mouth, it is like totally normal fat. It's actually more of a process than a substance.

Interesting. 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 Clans episode. Yeah. So he has a chapter in his book about cooking with O'Lestra.

He says, They can make O'Lestra butter and bake golden croissants with the fat calories of a piece of dry toast. They can make beef tallow O'Lestra for cooking truly perfect french fries. They can make cocoa butter O'Lestra and mold bars of smooth, rich dark chocolate. They can make lard O'Lra, and roll out pie crusts so light and flaky that you'll have to nail it to the kitchen table to keep it from floating away. So something I didn't know until I started working on this

was like, O'Lestra is a thing. Like you can make just like a ball of O'Lestra. Apparently it looks like Vaseline, but it has the consistency of sort of mayonnaise. Oh, oh, oh, those are two unappealing discreeters. I know, it's not great. So basically, Procter and Gamble has discovered this miracle fat, but they don't really

know what they have on their hands yet. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, they start testing it. O'Lestra poses a really interesting conundrum for sort of the food additive approval process. Because the entire system of sort of figuring out, you know those like colorings that they add to sodas and stuff like yellow five and like red 20 and whatever? Sure.

The entire process is built around the fact that these food additives were all consuming very small amounts of them. Even if you drink five sodas a day, the amount of yellow five that you're getting is like a fraction of a teaspoon. 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 and then from that you can kind of extrapolate

Well, you know, maybe smaller doses over the long term would cause similar effects like that's the entire paradigm of testing food additives. I will say I remember this from my middle school defenses of Diet Coke. Oh yeah, when people were like, Diet Coke gives you cancer and I was like, that research is when they inject a hundred times their body weight directly into a rat brain

or when I was just like, leave me alone, let me have Diet Coke. I have so little. I know, it's a generally conundrum for these things, right? Because how do you test something that might be harmful without actually harming humans? Absolutely. And so the problem with O'Lestra is that it's an actual substance.

Like you can't make a croissant with a hundred times the butter in it. Because that's physically impossible. Yeah. They discover O'Lestra in 1968, and it's not impossible. Yeah. There's this, you know, they discover O'Lestra in 1968, and it's not approved until 1996. There's almost 30 years of Procter & Gamble and the FDA essentially redesigning all of these testing procedures

around the substance that no other substance like this has ever been tested as a food additive. Huh! There's articles that come out in 1996 that call O'Lestra the most tested substance a food additive. Huh! There's articles that come out in 1996 that call Alestra the most tested substance in human history. One of the scientific articles that I found says, the safety of Alestra has been investigated in more than 100 long and short-term studies

in seven species and in more than 20,000 people, including children and people with existing gastrointestinal disease. Whoa! They test the shit out of this because at the end of this rainbow, there is potentially billions of dollars for proctor and gamble in this. And they know this.

Right, this is the promise of like every diet and diet food ever is like eat whatever you want and never gain a pound is like the phrase, right? So if they can make that true, um-hmm. Congratulations, you just signed the deed to Fort Knox. Exactly. It's literally all of the taste in none of the calories. Like this is what every diet or dreams of

and every food company dreams of. Totally. So Procter and Gamble eventually spends $500 million on this. Holy shit! I mean, some of that is like marketing and like planting a bunch of soy beans and weird shit. Like they inflate the number in various ways when they're trying to get approval,

but at least half of that is actual research and development. So as they're going through this 25-ish year testing process, they find two downsides, one of which has been documented extensively. The other one is less well-known. find two downsides, one of which has been documented extensively. The other one is less well known. So the first downside is that not only does O'Lestra not get absorbed, it actually sucks nutrients out of other foods. What?

Yes, so it's kind of like this rolling snowball that goes through your body and like picks up other things along the way. So the first thing they find out when they're testing this is that it removes vitamins A, D, E, and K. Like A and K in particular, and D, and E, thought they're all like so important for your body to have them. You need those. They're not like these filler vitamins. It also, have you heard of carotenoids?

I have heard the term. I do not know what it means. So carotenoids are basically why fruits and vegetables are good for you, or one of the main reasons. The most famous one is beta carotene and carrots, right? Ah! There's more than 500 carotenoids in like all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and those are just the ones that we know about. And Olesstra also sucks those up.

Oh, shit. Karatinoids are fat soluble, so they dissolve in fat, and then the fat gets absorbed. But if the fat doesn't get absorbed, they're just dissolving into the fat, and then the fat goes away. This feels like something that like,

like an evil scientist would make in a movie. Yeah. Well, lead people to think that they're being more healthy. And actually, we're sucking all the life force out. It's like, dementors. And this is wild. If you go on Google Scholar, you can find research from now, like very recent research, showing that you can actually use Olesstra

to remove poisons from people's systems. What? Yeah, like there's certain things that, like, you know, occupational poisons that people sort of get exposed to. And if you eat o'lester, it will actually remove those things from you. Yeah, you just poop it all out. But it's a huge problem for procter and gamble and for the FDA because the stuff with the vitamins,

you can fortify foods with extra vitamins that kind of counterbalance the amount of vitamin A, D, E, K. But you can't fortify foods with carotenoids because we don't really understand how carotenoids work. This is where it starts to feel like our sort of dog and pursuit of diet foods becomes this place where we get way out over our skis sort of scientifically where I'm just like, okay, but what if we just instead of spending all this fucking money testing out O'Lestra, what if we spent all this money being like, how do carotenoids work?

Yes, it would just be so great if our first question was about access, not about like, but how does it make me thin? Well, this is sort of the central thing with putting weight in the front of all of our health. This is the real problem because then in the drive to lose weight, we're actually fine with things that reduce health. That like, okay, this thing robs your body

of all these nutrients, but it'll make you thin, so it's an okay trade-off. Yeah, totally. 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. Nothing matters as much as being thin.

So that's one downside that it removes all these other nutrients. The other downside is the downside we all know about. So a parent, okay, according to my parents, I'm going on a digression because I want to have euphemisms for talking about this for the rest of the episode. So I guess when I was a kid, I couldn't say bowel movement when I was like four or five, it was like a difficult thing for my little child tongue to say. So I started saying BAMU, and then my parents started saying BAMU, and it's like become a whole thing that my family for decades now just says BAMU

when we wanna talk about like downstairs back door stuff. So the second downside of O'Lester is the BAMU stuff. Like the BAMU things start showing up very quickly. This is an excerpt from one of the scientific articles that I found. Olestra worked well, but not perfectly. Tests revealed that the indigestibility of the fat-like molecule was causing what early proctor and gamble documents described as leakage problems in the stool of a percentage of the people who

ate these fat-free foods. So in the early tests, this is one of the effects of having this snowball ravaging through your body and then sort of melting. This is an excerpt from Geoffrey Steingarten's book. The early, more liquid versions caused gastrointestinal problems. One of these anal seepage, or in my preference, passive oil loss, occurs when fully liquid olesstra separates from the food in which it was cooked and slips along the inner walls of peoples intestines by passing everything else in its way.

Drops of olesstra show up on their underwear or floating in their toilets. The FDA actually abbreviates this as OIT oil and toilet. Passive oil loss sounds like something British petroleum should be concerned with. The euphemisms, like we get into the jungle of euphemisms very quickly, which I'm actually fine with. I don't, I don't want to. You're like euphemism away. I'm here for it.

So keep those two downsides in your mind. These are what they found in the early testing And now we're gonna move into the FDA approval process. Oh Based on our old friend the food drug and cosmetic act of 1938 Anyone can make a food additive and apply for approval from the FDA But the obligation is on the company itself to do the testing. So I, Michael Hobbs, cannot just like come up with a food additive in my garage and be like, hi FDA, I need you to spend 10 years and 50 million dollars testing this food additive to make sure it's safe before you approve it. The obligation

is on me to spend the money to conduct tests that meet the sort of the FDA standards of quality to show that my food additive is safe. And if it's safe, then I can start putting it in food. Like that's the process. So that seems both good and bad. Yes, this is exactly in my notes. Tell me what you think. So on the one hand, it seems good in that, like, yes, it shouldn't be the responsibility

of the state to test the products of private companies, like fundamentally it is their responsibility to make sure it's safe. But also, if you turn over that testing to those private companies, it absolutely incentivizes sort of like research structures that are more favorable to the findings that you want. Yes. And also, it's not Michael Hobbs in his garage making food additives. It's proctor and gamble. Exactly.

The least Michael Hobbs in his garage. I know. This world has ever seen. It's only massive corporations that are trying to do this. And the FDA essentially has no power to run its own studies. Whoa. There's also the sort of probably even much bigger issue. This comes up in a chapter in Marion Nessel's book, Food Politics.

She has a whole chapter on O'Lestra. God bless Marion Nessel. Noted Aubrey Gordon Stan, Marion Nessel. I don't know about Stan, but I'll take like, she blurred my book and it was like one of the greater days of my life. So Mary and 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. It's delightful. So one of the things that Mary and 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 five that, you know that do they cause cancer or not. But there's nothing in this process about does it actually work?

Do people lose weight? Does this help people? 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. 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? So they're like, it will make you poop, but it won't give you cancer. Yes. Go to town. So in 1987, Procter and Gamble files the sort of official food additive approval. And so this takes nine years, this entire process. And there's a lot of sort of chapters of this that I'm gonna skip.

There's like a big fight about patents at one point. There's a big fight about sort of, can you put it in sweet stuff, can you put it in salty stuff? It's really boring and really technical, and I'm mostly just gonna skip all that because this takes nine years and otherwise we would be here all day. So, generally what you need to know

is the entire nine year approval fight is a battle between proctor and gamble and a nonprofit organization called the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Okay. Have you heard of them? I feel like that's a name that has come up at some point just in research for this show. Yes, I don't know more than just having heard the name.

So they are great. I've interviewed them for various stories over the years, 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. 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. They're basically accepting the terms of the debate, but just saying,

this particular additive shouldn't do it. Yeah, it feels like such a tricky moment of the debate, but just saying, oh, this particular additive shouldn't do it. 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. 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.

Oh my God, I know. 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. Yes, exactly. And so this is really one of the main problems with the debate over a lester, 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. We don't know about the long-term effects. Most of the studies that Proctor and Gamble has done have been small ends. Most of the studies that Procter and Gamble has done have been small ends. Most of them are short duration. They're not testing large quantities. That's really all they can do. They can only make these process concerns

because the FDA doesn't have the power to test this product itself. And CSPI also doesn't have the money to do independent tests. So all we can do is look at the data that Procter and Gamble is putting out and be like, we have quibbles with the data. So it's just another sort of weakness in this process

is it's just really hard to make a case against a company when all of the information you're basing it on is from the company. And none of it even has the cloak, I would imagine, at this point of impartiality, right? Well, I mean, some of it, honestly, it's a weird debate because a lot of the proctor and gamble studies, like, they're not necessarily doing it themselves

in their own labs, like they'll hire researchers from, you know, Johns Hopkins. You know, one of the studies that they have that they present to the FDA for approval, it's a hundred subjects, it's a controlled eight-week diet, it's like in a lab where they're actually monitoring how much people are eating. They're giving some people like sort of one can of Pringles a day.

They're giving other people like three cans of Pringles a day. They're giving other people placebo Pringles. And like they're testing, okay, is there a dose effect on any of these BAMU symptoms? It's actually a pretty well designed study. That's great. Also, give me some of those placebo pringles, please. I do.

That's because you think you sound good to me. A lot of the studies, like I've read this sort of federal register of all the studies that they submitted to the FDA in 1996 for approval and on their face, they're pretty good studies. One of the weirdest things about these gastrointestinal side effects is a lot of the studies do actually show that when people are eating these like fat-free Olestra Pringles, they'll actually report I am more likely to have diarrhea. But then they measure people's diarrhea. Like they actually measure like what kind of poops they're doing. And then Proctor and Gamble is like, these actually aren't like objectively speaking, these aren't diarrhea poops. Oh, Jesus.

So it's like this weird thing where it's like people report that they're having diarrhea. Like it feels to people like they're having diarrhea, but it's like it's not actually, they're not losing water to the extent that you do with sort of actual like evacuatory diarrhea stuff. I fucking hate this. And this is the part of the episode I've been dreading getting to,

like, is it diarrhea or not? I was like, man, Mike's doing pretty well with this amount of poop talk. I am quite capable. My hand is over my forehead. Just rocking. Yeah. Oh, buddy, I'm so sorry. This is basically the debate.

This is the data that we have in 1996 when there's all of this debate going on. There's also this is hella sketchy. One of Proctor and Gamble's competitors, Unilever, they do their own tests on O'Lastra and they put in petitions to the FDA that 15 to 30% of their participants got BAMO symptoms when they were eating the Olesstra chips. So like this then becomes like this weird fight between multinational corporations. About who has the least gastrointestinal symptoms?

Yeah, Unilever doesn't want this to get approved because they don't have the same thing. They have their own fat substitutes that they want to get approved. This is like professional wrestling or something. It's so bad, I know. Basically, this all comes to a head in 1995 that we're now on year eight of this approval process.

And Proctor and Gamble starts putting out all of these news stories and sort of think tank reports about how long this approval process has been. So there's infamously a house hearing in 1995 about US regulatory processes and like how long it takes to get approvals and the entire hearing is just an excuse to bash the FDA for taking so long to approve O'Lestra.

Wow. They managed to turn this into a news story of like, to bash the FDA for taking so long to approve O'Lestra. Wow. They managed to turn this into a news story of like, oh, you know, it's big government out of control. You know, we have this cure for the obesity epidemic right in front of us, and the FDA refuses to approve it. That's also so tricky because I can under, like a nine-year process slash 30-year process.

Yeah. That's a very, very, very long and onerous time, and it does sort of assure that only extraordinarily resourced corporations can like get through the process. Exactly. Turning it into a media story is so disingenuous and shitty. Yeah. And so at the end of 1995, there's the sort of the FDA's committee on Approving Food Additives Meets, and it votes 17 to 5 to approve O'Lestra. Whoa!

So this is fascinating, this is from the actual federal registry, the actual document that summarizes the reasons for its decision. It says, the Committee concluded that consumption of O'Lestra causes gastrointestinal effects, such as loose tools, abdominal cramping, and diarrhea-like symptoms. However, the committee concluded that while Olesstra caused these symptoms, there was no evidence that these effects represented adverse health consequences. So basically, we think that it is causing BAMO stuff, but the BAMO stuff isn't serious,

and so there's no reason not to approve this. Weird. Yes. That's so shitty to just be like, well, I mean, it seems like it, but we don't have enough proof, so here we go. Exactly. The compromise agreement that they come up with is that they will approve O'Lestra, but any products containing O'Lestra have to include a warning label.

And so I'm going to send this to you, hang on. Oh, yay. I feel like now that you're saying this, I absolutely remember that there was a warning label. Remember? And it was the anal leakage warning label, right? Like, that's where that language became popularized, right? Read this one out loud. Okay. This product contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools.

Loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients. Vitamins A, D, E, and K have been added. Holy shit, I did not realize they just like put it on the packaging. Yep. Like the vitamin absorption stuff got lost in a... torrential downpour of poop jokes. Well that's a thing. I mean when you've got poop jokes sitting right there, it's hard to focus on vitamin A, D, you know? Yeah, totally.

You know, in J. Leno's defense, there's no jokes in the poop stuff, then there is no vitamins. Yeah, that's right. God, that's so surprising. It's so different than I thought I remembered it. I mean, it still says loose duels. Yeah, gross. It's pretty bad. Yeah. So this is one of the compromises that

Parkland Gamble had to make to sell these chips. They had to have the warning label. The FDA also required them to do a bunch of post-market research. So after this was on the market, and millions of people were eating these chips, they would have to come back 30 months later to test like, are there actually more of these

bono symptoms in the population as a whole? So the FDA requires them to do more studies, essentially, and they require them to fortify all of these foods with extra vitamins to account for all the vitamins that you're losing from eating them. Yeah, which was also sort of like, I felt sort of enured to that in the 90s because there was all this talk about

fortified breakfast cereals, right? Yes. Corn flakes had like X number of vitamins and minerals added or whatever. I just always sort of as a kid assumed that that was sort of like a generally altrutrue aesthetic. Oh. And Devar. You also thought the proctor and gamble out of the goodness of its heart was like, this might make you shit yourself.

You know? Yeah, I mean, I didn't have any sense of regulatory mechanisms. I know. You're like, Coca-Cola wants what's best for me. I've seen those Santa ads. They're making Diet Coke and it's delicious and it's a lot of what I drink in seventh grade. Yeah. Okay, so it is now 1996. Olesstra has been approved with these weird caveats and this now becomes a marketing story.

Because, you know, Americans have been following this Olesstra story vaguely. You know, there's been news reports, there's been all this stuff about the hearings and not getting approved, etc. But most Americans don't really know about this. So Procter and Gamble has to do all of this sort of consumer education about these miracle new potato chips. They license the Olesstra technology to Frido-Lay, which comes out with these Lays Wow chips. And they start testing them in a couple of cities,

and then they eventually expand the test markets to Ohio and Indiana for Lay's Wow chips and Fat Free Pringles. So these are sort of America's first introduction to O'Lestra. So we are going to watch an ad for Lay's Wow chips. How delightful! It's lit. Remember the simple pleasures of being a kid?

They're back. Now you can eat like a kid again. When all you cared about was taste, introducing new Lays Wow Potato chips. They taste just as good as regular Lays. And because they're made with O'Lean, they're half the calories and a hundred percent fat free. Dad, how are we gonna get home?

You know son, you worry too much. New Lays Wow, life tastes good again. See? Whoa. They cut out the part where dad ate an edible before that. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. So they are in this ad, you see a kid sort of float by on a river on a sunny day. The kid is sort of laying in the middle of an inner tube. And then you see an adult float by the adult is holding a bag that says,

what does it say fat-free all the flavor or something like that? That's a weird ad that the angle that they would take is like, remember childhood. Remember how you thought about food and childhood? There's, I mean, I watched a bunch of other ones too. The main sort of message seems to be, like you can eat as much of this as you want,

and this is sort of a safe food to eat. Like it's very similar to other diet marketing. Although, what did you think of the presentation of O'Lestra in that ad? I think it's smart to present it as brand name O'Lean, because I think that makes more intuitive sense. Really? It's got the word lean in it. There you go.

Good job, marketing. Again, I feel really stuck on this idea of, I don't feel like I see a lot of diet marketing. That is, remember how you used to just eat and not think about it? Yeah. Like, that's a really fascinating angle to take. It also feels like a relatively light touch

on the Olestra end of things. This is even, okay, this is even more obvious in another ad because alongside the ad for sort of specific chips like fat free pringles and stuff, they're also doing ads for O'Lean as an ingredient. So there's like a separate campaign like full-page ads and the New York Times and stuff about like there's this new thing called O'Lean and it's amazing. So we're gonna watch an O'Lean ad that starts running at the same time. All right, here we go. ["Piano music playing"]

I remember the day he came to our farm just before harvest time. He introduced himself. We talked some. And he told me about something never been done before. Our soybeans, like mine, were now being used for a new kind of cooking oil. It seems the folks who make Criscoe had come up with O'Lean,

an oil that flies up snacks without adding any fatter calories. Make them taste specially good. So I told him, that sounds alright. And now I see what I'm part of, and it makes me feel good. Coming soon from the makers of Criscoe, new fat-friolene, And now I see what I'm part of, and it makes me feel good. Coming soon from the makers of Crisco, New Fabrio Lean, a good place to start. I feel like at the end of that, they should just play like an emproud to be an American. Like it looks like a political ad from the mid-90s, right?

It really does. I'm just a home spun farmer, growing soybeans, a thing that most Americans, at this point, don't really understand what they are or what they do or how they work or what they're in. I'm just a real American, worrying about fat and calories. I'm a ranch. Totally, totally. I'm just your farmer, grandpa.

That's so fascinating to me that so much of this was so like, wholesome all-American. I can't fathom a diet food being marketed that way now. It's such a weird move to me to have this thing that is created through like food science, in labs, and technology. It's like the least natural thing imaginable, and yet they're like like, now I'm just a country folk, trying to eat some chips. Yeah.

It's like someone came to my ranch and he told me that my soy beans were now gonna be used for a different kind of chip. I don't think they do that. Well, and the idea that Frito Lay is using the work of family farmers. Dude, I mean, no, no, no. This is the thing, it is very political campaign in the sort of the family farmer? Dude, I mean like, no, no, no. This is the thing, it's like, it is very political campaign in the sort of the family

farmer quote unquote, which almost does not exist in the United States. Like the number of actual sort of what we think of as family farmers are all but non-existent. But like this trope survives in political campaigns and like when they need whitewashing for extremely chemically processed ingredients, they're like we better truck out the family farmer.

Right, they're like we just go to the O'Lestra farm where we farm Frankenstein's molecule. Like they're just like they're trying to win over the public to a new sort of substance that could totally, reasonably freak people out, because they know that they also have to say that it causes loose stools and abdominal cramping. I know, real Americans don't get downstairs liquid problems. And if we do, it's from Buffalo wings.

Yeah, like God intended. There's also, okay, this is the really predictable part. There's also a years-long campaign by Proctor and Gamble to court, media figures, academics, and like doctors and stuff. You know, the American Medical Association puts out a statement supportive of O'Lestra but doesn't mention that it's also negotiating

an $800,000 donation from Houndering Amal at the same time. What? Yeah, they also fund a bunch of academic conferences and medical professionals. 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.

Like this just is a full court press. God, I mean, like it makes sense, right? Like that is how you market things, right? Yeah. You and I get emails about this where people are like, do you want to try our CBD gummies? Oh my fucking God. Yeah.

Show, do you want to try this thing? Do you want to try that thing? Do you want to try that thing? And like, that's how you get people on board is go, hear a bunch of trusted voices. They say this is fine. It's totally fine. Yes. This is an excerpt from a Mother Jones article

about this full court press. It says, Louis Sullivan, a former secretary of health and human services, which oversees the FDA, has addressed press conferences and written letters to the editor on behalf of Olesstra. Rarely is it noted that he also works as a paid proctor and gamble consultant.

In one dispatch to the New York Times, Sullivan identified only as the president of Morehouse's School of Medicine said, Americans can feel confident in the safety of snacks made with OlessLestra. So, you know, they're not like straight forward, like we will pay you money if you say these things. Yeah. But it's just like,

everything is just a little bit borderline. Yeah, it's not, it doesn't rise to the level of like the green coffee being extract guy on Doc Raws, but it's like riding a line. There's actually an article that comes out in the early 2000s where this is a dope methodology. They actually go through every single author

who wrote a paper on Oedlester, like all these scientific literature, weight loss literature, Bommu stuff literature, and they look into how many of these people have financial relationships with Proctor and Gamble, and of the supportive articles, like the articles that find no effective Olesstra, Olesstra's chill, 80% of the authors of those papers had at least one financial interaction with Procter and Gamble.

Again, you can't draw these very clean lines. There's not necessarily brown envelopes of cash trading hands. And you could just as easily say that Proctor and Gamble is seeking out researchers who are doing research, finding good things about Elestra, and paying them afterwards. The causal relationship doesn't necessarily go only in the one direction. Right. But it is just worth noting. Yeah, and that sort of failure to disclose part makes it seem fishier. Yeah. to be like, oh, they paid me money, but I'm not going to talk

about that. I'm just going to talk about how great their products are. Like, this is like Instagram ads, right? You have to add like hashtag ad. And this feels like it's missing the hashtag ad part of it. Just what it shows to me is how deeply embedded in the food science field the food companies are. Uh-huh. There's a really interesting passage in Marion Nessel's book where she says like, I have gotten money from Procter & Gamble. 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 and Gamble and Unilever and all the other ones because they're always the ones funding these things. This is a real like no ethical consumption under capitalism moment, right? Like there's no way for this to be clean and tidy for kind of anybody or for kind of any industry, right? Like particularly when folks don't disclose. Exactly, yeah.

So we now come to the downfall of O'Lestra. I am so fascinated by this. I don't actually know anything about how or why or when it came off the shelves. It just sort of was there and then it wasn't. It was there much longer than anybody realizes because what happened is O'Lester stayed on the shelves but the warning label disappeared. What?

So we get to, in 1998, the product goes national. So they've done these test markets, they then launched the thing nationally, they run all of these ads, and it sells somewhere around $400 million the first year, and they're expecting that to rise to 1.5 billion. But then within two years, it's down to 200 million. Oh.

There's a couple reasons for the collapse. The first is that because they're a little bit harder to make, and there's all these sort of there's extra steps in the industrial processes to make fat-free pringles, they're more expensive. There's also Stein Garden talks about the chips might not have been that good. Apparently, they left a sort of film on the roof of your mouth, kind of like a noticeable aftertaste, like greasiness.

Fundamentally, you're paying more for a product that isn't as good. Right, this is a little bit like when, I think it was probably like five years ago when stevia started showing up and everything and people were like, it's natural, it's sweet, but it's not sugar and it's actually sweeter than sugar and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and people were like, oh, it seems good and like bought a ton of like whatever with stevia in it at Costco and burnt themselves out on it

and then realized, oh wait, there is this sort of aftertaste. It's just sort of like genuine consumer feedback. It sounds like it's sort of what led to this kind of deflation, yeah? And also timing that, you know, remember snack wells, cookies peaked in 1995 and then by 1999, they were basically over. Oh, Lestra comes out in 1998. So we're at this sort of this rapid collapse of the fat-free consumer product market, right?

We're starting to get rid of these all these weird process products and we're starting to discover atkins. Like that's the FAD diet that we find a couple years later. There's also the thing, I mean, you can dive into the sort of the price data and the taste data and whatever, but also fundamentally to me anyway, we're talking about a product that has a warning label saying

you might shit yourself. Like I think some of the sort of optimistic projections are like, are you kidding me? No other food at the grocery store has a sign on it that says you might shit yourself. Like there's a significant chance you're going to shit yourself. Like that kind of matters. Well, and also, no product has that sign and no product has been required to have that sign. Exactly.

It also seems like extraordinarily predictable that this would be the kind of sort of like late night comedy fodder that it became. Oh yeah, perfect. I mean, that's the thing. It's like a lot of these unfortunate, a lot of these jokes are like lost to time. But I remember as a kid, O'Lestra jokes were everywhere. Like it was a national laughing stock. Yes. There's also the sort of the debate over the side effects of O'Lestra.

Because O'Lestra has now been on the market for two years. It's available to all Americans, and we can finally kind of answer the question. Does O'Lestra cause you to shit yourself? And this puts me in grave danger of like being canceled on my own podcast. But looking at all of the data, all of the information that we have about this,

the thing of O'Lestra making you shit yourself, I have to say, is kind of an urban legend. Really? The only actual evidence of O'Lestra causing all of this BAMU distress is right after they hit the market in 1996. The Center for Science in the Public Interest sets up a hotline where people can call in and report any symptoms that they have as a result of eating olesstra. So they, you know, they get reports of people saying like, I thought I was going to die. Another one says it was like childbirth. The Center for Science in the Public Interest says to this day that they and the FDA received more complaints about

Olesstra than any other food additive in history. Whoa! Yes, so they have this voluminous amount of complaints about, you know, people who ate Olesstra chips and had these horrific experiences. However, this being a show of two methodology queens, it is worth noting that like, this is an extremely shitty methodology. Right. You're basing this completely on anonymous phone calls, and you're not actually verifying anything. Well, this is also a little bit like when,

in like a given episode of Law and Order, when they're like, we have to move the trial to a different town because the jury pool is so tainted by media coverage of it, right? This is all happening at a time when at least once a day someone in your earshot is making a joke about a Lestra and shitting yourself. Exactly. Two hits a great credit.

CSPI did an actual sort of scientific phone survey of people who had symptoms, you know, after eating a lestra. And they found that 78% had seen negative stories about a lestra in the press. Uh-huh. Part of this is like people are being primed to attribute any stomach ache, anything that they had to the olesstera chips that they ate maybe an hour ago, maybe five days ago.

It's really hard to disentangle this from the fact that, like, yes, there were late night jokes about this and there was a fucking warning label on the package saying you might shit yourself. So alongside the CSPI hotline, Procter & Gamble also sets up a hotline. So on the bag of chips, it will say, if you have any questions about this product,

if you wanna report any problems with this product, call like whatever, 1-800-bomb of those stuff, like whatever it was, it was some hot number, right? And so Procter and Gamble also got, they got 15,000 calls, which CSPI and others say, oh my God, they're getting all these complaints, like a flood of complaints. But according to Procter and Gamble,

only 9% of those are actually complaints. The rest of them are just like requests for information. Where do I buy these in my town? I kind of random ass shit. And they've published the data from all of these calls that they get to the hotline. And what's really interesting is the calls, the sort of the complaints to the hotline spike

after the chips are introduced in the test market. And there's like a wave of marketing and a wave of news stories like, hey, this weird technological ingredient is coming onto the market. And then they taper off very quickly. But that doesn't actually track with sales. Because right when the products are introduced, the sales are relatively low, and then sales increase over time. But the calls completely taper off. So if you had people who are actually shitting themselves based on eating these chips,

you would have calls to the hotline rising as sales of the chips rise. And you don't see that pattern, you see the spike around media coverage of O'Lestra not sales of O'Lestra. Right, I could also see that that wave of calls like the same kind of person who would call a proctor and gamble hotline would be the first person in their town to try a new kind of chip. And sort of pride themselves on it, right? So that's like more a measure of sort of like how are early adopters responding to this than it is about like what's the effect of this food? Right. We should be careful. These are all proctor and gamble studies, right? So just on their face, we should be skeptical of this. But the information all proctor and gamble studies, right? So just on their face, we should be skeptical of this.

But the information that proctor and gamble publishes is that another thing that shows up in the reports on the hotline is that people will say, I ate these O'Lester chips at noon and I was like, shitting myself by two. And that isn't something that showed up in any of the clinical data or any of the sort of double-blind placebo tests that they had done while they were developing the chips. So all of the symptoms take two or three days to happen. Like it has to kind of build up in your system and you have to eat like a can of pringles

every day. And then by day three or four, you're reporting that you have diarrhea. But you're not getting that like an hour later, because that's like physically impossible, because it takes a long time for the sort of the fat to get through your large intestine. So a lot of the complaints that people are reporting are like basically impossible. And there's also no relationship

between vulnerable groups and olester side effects. So among the population, you would expect elderly people and children to have much greater likelihood of symptoms because they have just kind of weaker guts generally. And yet, the complaints to proctor and gamble are like very evenly distributed throughout the population. Ha! Proctor and gamble also does a thing where they recruit people who complained about the gastrointestinal symptoms. So they get all these complaints, they get people's contact information, and they get a hundred people, and Procter & Gamble does this sort of double-blind,

placebo-controlled study where they give half of them chips every day, and what they find after eight weeks is that there's no difference between Olesstra and the placebo group. Jesus. So again, we want to be careful because this is Procter and Gamble designing the study, right? And companies lie.

So, you know, we don't want to sort of give Procter and Gamble all of the credit. But again, on its face, this seems like a pretty good way of testing. Well, systemically, Procter and Gamble is doing this, but so far, that's the only research we have access to. Exactly.

Which is a problem. Which is systemically a problem. Absolutely no question. I know. So you kinda gotta go on what you got or make major systemic reforms that will take decades, go for it. Right.

This is not a proctor and gamble stand episode or like, you know, O'Lestra is a maligned figure from the 1990s. I do not give a shit. Like, I have no interest in defending O'Lestra is a maligned figure from the 1990s. I do not give a shit. Like, I have no interest in like defending O'Lestra, but like bring it back. Like, it never got approved actually in Canada, the UK, or the EU. And like, I don't give a shit. Like, they have not been deprived of anything. Like, we'll get into the sort of broader structural reasons why O'Lestra is trash, but like, there's no sort of smoking gun of like people actually having these symptoms.

And it took me a long time to sort of believe Procter and Gamble, because this is what Procter and Gamble has always said, is that on any given month, 40% of Americans have gastrointestinal symptoms. Yeah. Abdominal cramping, diarrhea, sort of feeling bad in your bum, and it's very difficult to sort of trace these things back to one thing that you ate.

Basically, to me, it's the central reason why Olesstra never should have been approved in the first place because it's impossible to untangle the effect of the chips from just the population having gastrointestinal issues generally. Yeah, totally. I mean, like this is also how we get whole 30 and like elimination diets broadly, this idea that like, if I feel bad, it must be because of a food. I just have to figure out which food and stop eating that food when there's still so much that we don't know about digestion and about what causes gastrointestinal distress.

Like, it's just a fiction that we keep chasing without really a whole lot of evidence to back it up. Well, this is why one of the most fascinating studies on this was this is also a Procter & Campbell study, so grains of salt, but they basically set up this thing in a movie theater where they said, hey, come and watch a movie, you get all you can eat chips in a movie theater where they said, hey, come and watch a movie, you get all you can eat chips.

So basically when you come in, you get like a can of fucking pringles and they give you like as many pringles as you want. So some people are eating a little, some people are eating a lot. And then afterwards, they measure people's gastrointestinal symptoms. So it is true that of the people who went to this movie theater test and who ate O'Lestra chips, 16% of them had various gastrointestinal issues afterwards. Do you want to know what percentage of people had gastrointestinal issues after eating normal chips?

Sixteen percent? Eighteen percent. So it's one of those things where like, yes, O'Lestra causes problems, but maybe all of the other stuff causes problems too. Like it just all causes problems. Mm-hmm. This is like very genuinely blowing my mind. Isn't it what me too?

It's like very genuinely blowing my mind. This is what's happening right now. So basically, brass tax, my read of the entire situation from everything that I read, from the federal documents to various independent studies that have come out since all of this controversy is basically if you eat like a decent amount of Olesstra foods, like a can of Pringles every single day. After three or four days, there's about a 20% chance that you'll get like some Bommu

symptom. For the majority of people, it's going to be something relatively minor, like farting, like you're going to fart more, or like one of them was like pooping frequency, like you're going to poop more, but there's a small percentage of that small percentage is going to get things that are more irritating, like abdominal cramping or diarrhea, and there's a couple of extremely isolated, extremely anecdotal cases of people with severe, like requiring hospitalization symptoms. But those are so rare that when they happen, like there's an entire journal article about

them. So, there's literally a journal article about two children that had like severe gastrointestinal distress after eating olestra, but they were also taking orelastat at the same time. Oh, God. Yeah, it's not clear how those things were interacting, but it's in extremely rare cases. It sounds like something super severe can happen. And that's like olesstra, famously a diarrhea factory,

and orelastat also famously a diarrhea factory, right? That's a pretty unique situation, right? That's not a clean read on just O'Lestra or just Orlestat. Right. That seems to be the overall state of the data. Although we should also note, a very important caveat that, of course, Proctor and Gamble does not bring up themselves, is that O'Lestra was not designed to just be in chips. Like the vision of O'Lestra was that it would be all over the US food supply.

Right. Like the plan was to have this in cookies, to have this in breads, to have this in like crackers. Like there was O'Lestra wheat thins at one point. They were going to have like restaurants using it. So the idea of like if you eat reasonably large portions of this every single day you're going to get symptoms Well, the idea was for all of us to be eating quite a bit of this like that was the vision at the end of the rainbow So if 20% of the population is getting some form of distress

If the food supply had started incorporating this more we all would have been eating moderate amounts of it at some point. Like this was never going to be sustainable. Right, so like the volume of poop jokes that we got about O'Lestra was maybe sort of jumping the gun, right? Like was not born out by the data that we had, but it would have been born out by the sort of vision for O'Lestra.

Yeah, the poop jokes were a warning to us all. The canary in the poop coal mine. Yes, in the poop mine. Ha ha ha ha. But then what's so interesting is, you know, all of the debate around O'Lestra, generally in the literature, is around, does it cause bomb-oo explosions or not?

But there's the much bigger question about O'Lestra is does it help people to lose weight or not? Like the entire justification for O'Lestra was supposed to be, it helps people lose weight. So one of the only studies I found that actually tests O'Lestra for weight loss, they tested O'Lestra versus a reduced fat diet versus a control diet. And they found that O'Lestra was significantly better than the reduced fat diet. But of course, as we always do on this show, you have a zoom in on the actual results.

So people who were on the reduced fat diet lost six pounds and people who were on the O'Lestra diet lost 10 pounds. This was over 10 weeks. So you know, six pounds, 10 pounds, like it's all pretty modest. But then as soon as I saw this, I was so excited to tell you about it.

Because of course this gets written up in the press and you could find it like, oh my God, it turns out a listard does work for weight loss. But then you look at the actual specifics and there's only 15 people in the study. No! First of all, so it's three groups of five people each. That's a kindergarten classroom divided up

into three different groups at play time. Yeah, this isn't in the abstract, but if you zoom in like you actually read the actual study It notes that you know Maybe the reason why people lost more weight on the O Lester diet than the reduced fat diet is that everyone in the O Lester A group was fat and everyone in the reduced fat group was skinny. Ah, fuck off! So it's like, uh, fuck, uh, uh, uh, uh. Isn't this the thing you're supposed to be measuring?

Every fat person can tell you and also like anyone who understands arithmetic can tell you. A smaller percentage of a fat person's body weighs more than a larger percentage of a thin person. You know what I mean? Like, proportionately, you may be losing weight at the same kind of rate if you look at percentages, which is a more meaningful measure, I would say, than straight up just like numerical pounds lost. Yes, it seems like, you know,

we're gonna test whether Thailand all helps with headaches and we're gonna split people into groups and you know, it seems like, you know, we're gonna test where their Tylenol helps with headaches, and we're gonna split people into groups, and you know, it really helps with this one group. Oh, it turns out people in one group had headaches, and the people in the other group didn't have headaches. It's like, well, you can't have that as a variable. I will say this is also like a bizarro grape that I sort of have with weight loss world broadly, right? Aside from like bariatric weight loss surgeries,

there's not really any distinguishing between like, what kind of person does this help to lose weight? Under what circumstances, right? Like the number of well-intended and terrible thin women who have come up to me and been like, I lost like 20 pounds on this thing. You should totally try it, right? Where I'm like, oh, you don't have any sense

of the mechanics of losing 150 pounds. Yes, so basically the studies on O'Lestra for weight loss are, you know, as inconclusive as they are for every other thing for weight loss. Like it works in the short term or maybe it doesn't, and some studies find it, and some studies don't. But the mechanism behind this appears to be this idea of the compensation effect, that

most famously with artificial sweeteners, when you give people a diet coke, they'll just drink more. Because they're like, oh, well, there's no sugar in it, so I can drink more of it. And so the idea is that when people know that their food has a luster in it, and there's no fat and no calories, then they're just going to end up eating more. And they do actually find this in rat studies when they give them like little rat pringles, they'll compensate like they'll eat. I think it's like exactly 35% more to compensate for the fact that they have 35% fewer calories.

Like in this kind of exact one-to-one way. But the human literature, and I like the literature mentions this, that humans don't eat for the same reason that rats do, right? Like we're not just seeking homeostasis. We eat for social reasons, we eat for emotional reasons, we eat because we're bored, we eat for a million reasons not related to our sort of hunger and satiety signals. And so in humans, the research is kind of all over the place. Some studies find like there's one study that finds,

if you eat whatever bread made with oedestra for breakfast, you'll compensate by eating more at dinner. Like there's some studies that find this, there's weird buffet studies that don't find a compensation effect. It seems to really depend on the method that you're using to measure the compensation effect and sort of like the day to day stuff.

And this stuff is really hard to measure too because people know they're in a study, but it seems to be that people don't compensate calories if they don't know that they're eating a lestra chips. So if you give people like olesstra foods and you're just like, here's some foods, people will actually reduce their calorie consumption. But if you give them old-lestra foods and you're like, hey, here's some foods with fewer calories and less fat, they will actually compensate because they know they're eating less at the initial meal with a lester in it. Uh-huh, and I think I would imagine that folks have been sort of burned so many times by diet foods or like have a sort of lived experience, right? With lower fat. Like there is now an existing expectation that it will be less satisfying that you will need more later.

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. Right. I mean, you find these articles that say, like, well, there's no compensation effect for O'Lestra and it only happens that people know they're eating O'Lestra. 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 O'Lestra? 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. Yeah. Again, this isn't like some footnote. 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. Right. So like at the population level, if we want to like make America lose weight using oleastra, Somehow you'd have to put this into our food without telling us? 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. Like what? Exactly. Mike, I feel like this is rearranging my brain around what I've sort of thought I knew. I know.

I know. I know that the doctor and gamble is good, giant corporations, everything they do is fine. Nope, you know? No, Mike, I'm out. I'm back out. Never mind, it totally made you shake yourself. I'm done. I feel deeply weird about this episode

and this conclusion, by the way. It's totally weird. It makes me, this is a real history should make you feel weird moment. Yes. Do you want to get to the twist of the twist? Oh my God, there's more twist. Oh yeah.

Bring me more twist, Michael. So these studies, all of this post-market testing stuff, is how Procter & Gamble convinces the FDA to remove the warning label in 2003. Uh huh. Oleserus stays on the market. You know, it's in chips. They rebrand Lays Wow chips as Lays light. But you know, fat free Pringles, Lays chips, they rebrand, lays, wow, chips, as lays light. But you know, fat-free, pringles,

lays chips, they're on the market for years. It doesn't seem like they were ever big sellers. It was never the sort of sensation that Procter & Gamble wanted it to be, but it's just kind of quietly on the market for ages. We actually tried to find O'Lester chips to eat for this episode and we could not find any.

Like, you can find them on the sort of like, the Walmart website or whatever, but they've been sold out for ages. So I think that's just kind of quietly faded from the market. But one of the only independent studies that I found found that O'Lestra actually gives people less gastrointestinal symptoms than other food additives. You shut the fuck up right now, Michael.

Fucking bananas. So do you remember our old friend from the Halo Top episode, Sobital? I sure do. Researchers did a double blind placebo controlled study where they gave people doses of Sobital, doses of Olestra and doses of Placebo. And this is a quote from the article,

people who ate Sobital 40 grams a day had liquid slash loose stools within one to three hours of consumption. Olesstra consumption at levels far in excess of normal snacking conditions resulted in a gradual stool softening effect after several days of consumption did not meet any of the three objective measures of diarrhea and did not increase gastrointestinal symptoms. Oh, Lester has this miserable reputation for causing people to shit themselves in tower records. Other food additives actually have worse effects, like objectively worse effects, but they haven't been subject to the same amount of media scrutiny.

Right. The stuff that's in halotop is xylitol and this one's sorbitol, but they're both sugar alcohols, which are in every thing 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. It'll also scramble your hunger cues potentially. There's research that suggests that that may be happening, right? Like, it feels like we're in one of those moments where there's an olesstra happening right now.

Yeah. Woof! Sorbitol does what we thought olesstra did. And does it more acutely? Yes. Oh, Mike, I feel like I'm leaving the movie theater after seeing the witch or hereditary. You know what I mean?

Where you're like, oh, this feels bad in a very large scale kind of way. 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 O'Lestra back, O'Lestra is good. No.

The problem with O'Lestra isn't the fact that it made people shit themselves. The problem with O'Lestra is that it never should have existed in the first place. Uh-huh. Like, we're not going to have a technological solution to a political public health problem. We're just not.

So the entire endeavor is just pointless. Like, why do we need a fake fat with zero calories and dubious long-term effects when we can just do the things that we know are going to make people healthier now? Subsidize fruits and vegetables. Like, make it more accessible for people, make it easier for people to walk and bike to work.

Like, these are the things that we talk about every single episode, and we're not doing those things. A Lestra also feels like a house that's built on a foundation of sand. Yes. It also was uncritically replicating and giving credence to the idea that dietary fat was what made people fat. Yes. Even more than that, the sand underneath that sand is there are too many fat people and there need to be less fat people. Again, I fundamentally disagree with the idea

that there's too much of a kind of person. There are plenty of health conditions that we can address. There are plenty of ways to get around this stuff, but this just feels like a failure of both systems and of critical thinking about cultural beliefs, right? Yeah. I feel like the stuff that I'm taking away from this episode are a few things.

One, this is what happens when you don't have systems set up for that sort of technology that's coming down the pike, right? This is also what happens when you have outdated policies and policy structures for how things get on the market and where the testing lives. It's also what happens when ethics sort of take a backseat to consumer behaviors or like the will of the market. And it's what happens when we sort of like underestimate

the role that like art and comedy and media play in the formation of our opinions of things, right? Like, my strongest memories of Alestra are about the jokes about pooping yourself, right? So like, at some point it does sort of worm its way into your brain, right? Right. This is genuinely, like I'm going to be thinking and talking about this for like a couple of weeks. I would like to thank you for making me more and sufferable to my family.

It turns out all along, this was a story about feeling weird in your upstairs. ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ you