January 16, 2019 • 11 mins
In the 90s a fat free miracle food came out that promised we could eat all we wanted and not gain weight. But there was a caveat: it could also make your bowels unpleasantly loose.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. So
let's get started. Everybody be quiet and listen. Get ready
to feel like you're gonna poop your pants, because we're
gonna talk about a lestra which would make you poop
your pants. Yeah. So this one starts back in the fifties. Uh,
we can't talk about a lester without mentioning the Seven
(00:24):
Country Study, which was very famous in the fifties for
for fooling science and the world into the notion that
fats are terrible they will kill you don't eat them.
So all foods started saying, great, we're gonna put out
no fat stuff and start pumping in high fruit dose
(00:45):
corn syrup into our things to create flavor. And the
world is the worst for it. Right, Yeah, I think
we need to do is a straight up stuff you
should know episode about the seven the Seven Country Study.
Okay for sure, So stop talking about it now. Okay.
So the upshot of what you just said is that
we live in we by I think the seventies or eighties,
(01:08):
we lived in like a fat free obsessed society, right,
and the manufacturers of food said, hey, sure, we'll we'll
give it to you. We'll do some of those amazing
things that Chuck just mentioned, and um, we'll give you
low fat food as much as you can take. And
by the mid nineties, like the whole thing was at
its peak. Man, like the you remember, um, healthy Choice.
(01:31):
I think Healthy Choice is still around. So they came
out with a line of foods and in healthy Choice,
just a healthy Choice line of food um made one
point three billion dollars in sales, Like that's how much
that People were like, here, take all my money, just
give me some fat free foods because fat's gonna kill
me and make me fat. And um, I hate fat.
(01:54):
Don't you hate fat? Yes, because it's the word fat
and you don't want to be that word right right.
Plus also, I think everybody was scared to death. We're
all going to die of heart attacks if we ate
like any fat whatsoever. So the solution was fat free
foods and it was in full swing in the nineties.
So Um, by this time, I believe it was Procter
(02:16):
and Gamble that came up with the lestra right, Yeah,
they came up with that. That's just their trade name
for UH polyester sucros, and this was developed by them
in the late sixties, but it took to the nineties
to really catch hold in full. And this is one
of those where they it's not like they didn't do
product research. They did a lot of testing and research,
(02:39):
and they learned that Olestra would make you poop your pants,
and they pressed on anyway UH and went forward knowing this,
which it was an interesting decision to say the least. Yeah,
like they were searching for a fat substitute for formula
to to um feed premature infants. Yeah, which is a
(03:00):
eat start. It is a sweet start, and hopefully they
realized very quickly that no infant should ever have polyester
sucros passed through its mouth. It's probably hard to tell
with babies, Yeah, that's true, UM, but it's not hard
to tell with adults. And like you said, their their
product testing showed there are some real problems with the
lestra When you ate it, um, you would get abdominal cramping,
(03:23):
you would get flatulent, you would poop your pants. Like
you said, there were a lot of things that came
back that that were red flags and should have been
to Procter and Gamble that that should have told them, like,
don't put this into food products and then sell them
to consumers, because this is going to be bad. But
Procter and Gamble, it's spent you know, hundreds of millions
(03:45):
of dollars developing this stuff by this time and being
been in in development for like thirty years. And so
they said, nope, we're going to do this. We're going
to go get the FDA to approve it. And the
FDA said, okay, we'll give you approval, but you have
to put a warning on any food item, like the
container of any food item that you sell this stuff in. Yeah,
(04:05):
and that that label I remember seeing it. It literally
said it could cause abdom a, dominal cramping and loose stools. Uh.
They were marketed um for their line for like pringles
in and free lay as wow. Uh all upper case
exclamation point. And despite the fact that it said on
the label like, hey, this will give you diarrhea, people
(04:28):
are like, well, I get that, but can I eat
a whole bag of chips and not have any fat?
And the label said sure? And I think that was
I think that actually increased the diarrhea and the cramping
was the fact that people probably overindulged even because they could. Yeah,
and so we should probably talk real quick about the
science behind this, right, Yeah, let's do it. So um,
(04:51):
polyester sucros mimics fat and its taste, its mouth feel,
it does everything that fat does except get metabolized by body. Right, So,
like A like a triglystrite, and naturally occurring fat is
A is a molecule fatty acids surrounded by three chains
of hydrocarbons. And when you eat that thing, that molecule UM,
(05:12):
your body metabolizes it by breaking the hydrocarbon chains off
of it and using that fatty acid either for energy
or to store later to use his energy as fat. Okay,
that's the naturally occurring stuff. So for polyester sucrose, it
has a sucrose molecule and it's surrounded by hydrocarbon chains too,
(05:32):
but there's a lot of them, so much so that
the parts of your body that normally metabolize fat can't
break through all those hydrocarbon chains. And so that molecule
of polyester sucrose goes through your body untouched. It comes
out the other end just like it went in. So
you get the mouth feel, you get the taste you get, Yeah,
(05:53):
you get the experience of eating fatty foods with no
fat and no weight gain whatsoever. Her The problem is
on the other side, when it does come out, it
comes out with a lot of poop and a lot
of cramping. And there's another problem with this whole thing
that we'll talk about right after this. All right, So
(06:38):
nice job, by the way with the science. Thank you.
I appreciate that you're welcome, because I was not ready
any time. Uh So they discovered with olestra, this is great.
It just comes out the body like it goes in.
These idiots will still eat it. It It doesn't metabolize. Here's
here's the big issue with that is the body is
(07:00):
used to metabolizing fats, but now all of a sudden,
your body gets confused because it's used to doing things
one way, and all of a sudden your body is like, well,
wait a minute, maybe maybe I shouldn't metabolize any fats.
Fool me once, yeah, kind of, And so it messed
with the body chemistry because it literally confused it in
(07:21):
these artificial fats. And I think this is true a
lot of times with artificial ingredients, your body doesn't know
how to react to that. Uh. And so all of
a sudden, you're gaining weight even though you're eating fat
free foods because your body is not metabolizing any fats.
So when you eat you indulge on that cheese steak,
it's not getting metabolized no, because so like the polyester
(07:43):
sucros gets passed through it, your body doesn't absorb it,
but your body will absorb naturally occurring fats even if
they're not metabolized. It gets stored for fat later. So
if your body is not metabolizing either of it, then
all the fat that's going through is just being packed on.
People who were eating this fat free fat substitute, we're
(08:04):
actually gaining weight from recent research shows amazing. Even worse
than that possibly is that the alestra was like a
magnet for vitamins and nutrients, So when it passed through
your digestive system untouched, it actually was taking vitamins and
nutrients that were already present with it. So you can
(08:24):
actually develop a vitamin deficiency from eating too much alestra. However,
despite all of this, I know this is the kicker, uh.
Initial sales of these chips, just these those wild chips
was about four hundred million dollars in that year. Uh.
That was the I believe the first year that Procter
(08:44):
and Game will debut these chips. Everyone is pooping their pants,
they're eating I think they found in studies that the
wild de rito's uh, if you ate sixteen of those chips, uh,
fifty of the participants. Half the people that ate at
least steam chips got diarrhea. Right. Uh, So you would
think they find this out, they make their money, and
(09:05):
then they get out and they're just like, all right,
we're done with a lester because I don't see a
lester anymore on any packaging. Right, Yeah, it's gone the
way of the dinosaur. Is that Is that the case,
my friend? That is absolutely not the case. No, it's
just not called o lester anymore. Yeah. Back in two
thousand two, the FDA said, you know what, we were
pretty wasted when we made you put that that warning
(09:25):
label on. We've since entered the program and we want
to make amends, so you don't have to put the
warning label on any longer. You can just take that off. Yeah,
and now you don't see them as well, because that
got a bad name by association. Now you just see
them as light chips or fat free uh crackers and
(09:47):
things like that. Yeah. So they're still using polyester sucros
in certain products like Lays light potato chips or Ruffles
light or fat free ritz or fat free wheat thins um,
but they just don't call it all estra or olean
or anything like that. It's still the same thing. But
I think that that Procter and Gamble managed to get
that label taken off because they successfully argued that the
(10:10):
results were really no worse than if you ate a
lot of like high fibers. They're like, I mean, look
at prune juice. Yeah, I have a special label on that.
Everybody loves prune juice, but you have no label. Nobody
likes brune juice. No, what are prunes made from? Are
they dates or um? Uh? I always get those confused,
(10:31):
the the dehydrated um. You know what I'm talking about? Prunes? Right?
So what is a prune? Is it a figure? A uh?
Is a date? A dehydrated version of something. I'm just
enjoying this. I think a prune is a plum? Okay, great, great, Well,
(10:52):
then a date is a dehydrated fig. My friend, and
a raisin is a dehydrated grape. That's right, and that
concludes this episode of short Stuff. Okay, well, if you
want to get in touch with let's send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. So
let's get started. Everybody be quiet and listen. Get ready
to feel like you're gonna poop your pants, because we're
gonna talk about a lestra which would make you poop
your pants. Yeah. So this one starts back in the fifties. Uh,
we can't talk about a lester without mentioning the Seven
(00:24):
Country Study, which was very famous in the fifties for
for fooling science and the world into the notion that
fats are terrible they will kill you don't eat them.
So all foods started saying, great, we're gonna put out
no fat stuff and start pumping in high fruit dose
(00:45):
corn syrup into our things to create flavor. And the
world is the worst for it. Right, Yeah, I think
we need to do is a straight up stuff you
should know episode about the seven the Seven Country Study.
Okay for sure, So stop talking about it now. Okay.
So the upshot of what you just said is that
we live in we by I think the seventies or eighties,
(01:08):
we lived in like a fat free obsessed society, right,
and the manufacturers of food said, hey, sure, we'll we'll
give it to you. We'll do some of those amazing
things that Chuck just mentioned, and um, we'll give you
low fat food as much as you can take. And
by the mid nineties, like the whole thing was at
its peak. Man, like the you remember, um, healthy Choice.
(01:31):
I think Healthy Choice is still around. So they came
out with a line of foods and in healthy Choice,
just a healthy Choice line of food um made one
point three billion dollars in sales, Like that's how much
that People were like, here, take all my money, just
give me some fat free foods because fat's gonna kill
me and make me fat. And um, I hate fat.
(01:54):
Don't you hate fat? Yes, because it's the word fat
and you don't want to be that word right right.
Plus also, I think everybody was scared to death. We're
all going to die of heart attacks if we ate
like any fat whatsoever. So the solution was fat free
foods and it was in full swing in the nineties.
So Um, by this time, I believe it was Procter
(02:16):
and Gamble that came up with the lestra right, Yeah,
they came up with that. That's just their trade name
for UH polyester sucros, and this was developed by them
in the late sixties, but it took to the nineties
to really catch hold in full. And this is one
of those where they it's not like they didn't do
product research. They did a lot of testing and research,
(02:39):
and they learned that Olestra would make you poop your pants,
and they pressed on anyway UH and went forward knowing this,
which it was an interesting decision to say the least. Yeah,
like they were searching for a fat substitute for formula
to to um feed premature infants. Yeah, which is a
(03:00):
eat start. It is a sweet start, and hopefully they
realized very quickly that no infant should ever have polyester
sucros passed through its mouth. It's probably hard to tell
with babies, Yeah, that's true, UM, but it's not hard
to tell with adults. And like you said, their their
product testing showed there are some real problems with the
lestra When you ate it, um, you would get abdominal cramping,
(03:23):
you would get flatulent, you would poop your pants. Like
you said, there were a lot of things that came
back that that were red flags and should have been
to Procter and Gamble that that should have told them, like,
don't put this into food products and then sell them
to consumers, because this is going to be bad. But
Procter and Gamble, it's spent you know, hundreds of millions
(03:45):
of dollars developing this stuff by this time and being
been in in development for like thirty years. And so
they said, nope, we're going to do this. We're going
to go get the FDA to approve it. And the
FDA said, okay, we'll give you approval, but you have
to put a warning on any food item, like the
container of any food item that you sell this stuff in. Yeah,
(04:05):
and that that label I remember seeing it. It literally
said it could cause abdom a, dominal cramping and loose stools. Uh.
They were marketed um for their line for like pringles
in and free lay as wow. Uh all upper case
exclamation point. And despite the fact that it said on
the label like, hey, this will give you diarrhea, people
(04:28):
are like, well, I get that, but can I eat
a whole bag of chips and not have any fat?
And the label said sure? And I think that was
I think that actually increased the diarrhea and the cramping
was the fact that people probably overindulged even because they could. Yeah,
and so we should probably talk real quick about the
science behind this, right, Yeah, let's do it. So um,
(04:51):
polyester sucros mimics fat and its taste, its mouth feel,
it does everything that fat does except get metabolized by body. Right, So,
like A like a triglystrite, and naturally occurring fat is
A is a molecule fatty acids surrounded by three chains
of hydrocarbons. And when you eat that thing, that molecule UM,
(05:12):
your body metabolizes it by breaking the hydrocarbon chains off
of it and using that fatty acid either for energy
or to store later to use his energy as fat. Okay,
that's the naturally occurring stuff. So for polyester sucrose, it
has a sucrose molecule and it's surrounded by hydrocarbon chains too,
(05:32):
but there's a lot of them, so much so that
the parts of your body that normally metabolize fat can't
break through all those hydrocarbon chains. And so that molecule
of polyester sucrose goes through your body untouched. It comes
out the other end just like it went in. So
you get the mouth feel, you get the taste you get, Yeah,
(05:53):
you get the experience of eating fatty foods with no
fat and no weight gain whatsoever. Her The problem is
on the other side, when it does come out, it
comes out with a lot of poop and a lot
of cramping. And there's another problem with this whole thing
that we'll talk about right after this. All right, So
(06:38):
nice job, by the way with the science. Thank you.
I appreciate that you're welcome, because I was not ready
any time. Uh So they discovered with olestra, this is great.
It just comes out the body like it goes in.
These idiots will still eat it. It It doesn't metabolize. Here's
here's the big issue with that is the body is
(07:00):
used to metabolizing fats, but now all of a sudden,
your body gets confused because it's used to doing things
one way, and all of a sudden your body is like, well,
wait a minute, maybe maybe I shouldn't metabolize any fats.
Fool me once, yeah, kind of, And so it messed
with the body chemistry because it literally confused it in
(07:21):
these artificial fats. And I think this is true a
lot of times with artificial ingredients, your body doesn't know
how to react to that. Uh. And so all of
a sudden, you're gaining weight even though you're eating fat
free foods because your body is not metabolizing any fats.
So when you eat you indulge on that cheese steak,
it's not getting metabolized no, because so like the polyester
(07:43):
sucros gets passed through it, your body doesn't absorb it,
but your body will absorb naturally occurring fats even if
they're not metabolized. It gets stored for fat later. So
if your body is not metabolizing either of it, then
all the fat that's going through is just being packed on.
People who were eating this fat free fat substitute, we're
(08:04):
actually gaining weight from recent research shows amazing. Even worse
than that possibly is that the alestra was like a
magnet for vitamins and nutrients, So when it passed through
your digestive system untouched, it actually was taking vitamins and
nutrients that were already present with it. So you can
(08:24):
actually develop a vitamin deficiency from eating too much alestra. However,
despite all of this, I know this is the kicker, uh.
Initial sales of these chips, just these those wild chips
was about four hundred million dollars in that year. Uh.
That was the I believe the first year that Procter
(08:44):
and Game will debut these chips. Everyone is pooping their pants,
they're eating I think they found in studies that the
wild de rito's uh, if you ate sixteen of those chips, uh,
fifty of the participants. Half the people that ate at
least steam chips got diarrhea. Right. Uh, So you would
think they find this out, they make their money, and
(09:05):
then they get out and they're just like, all right,
we're done with a lester because I don't see a
lester anymore on any packaging. Right, Yeah, it's gone the
way of the dinosaur. Is that Is that the case,
my friend? That is absolutely not the case. No, it's
just not called o lester anymore. Yeah. Back in two
thousand two, the FDA said, you know what, we were
pretty wasted when we made you put that that warning
(09:25):
label on. We've since entered the program and we want
to make amends, so you don't have to put the
warning label on any longer. You can just take that off. Yeah,
and now you don't see them as well, because that
got a bad name by association. Now you just see
them as light chips or fat free uh crackers and
(09:47):
things like that. Yeah. So they're still using polyester sucros
in certain products like Lays light potato chips or Ruffles
light or fat free ritz or fat free wheat thins um,
but they just don't call it all estra or olean
or anything like that. It's still the same thing. But
I think that that Procter and Gamble managed to get
that label taken off because they successfully argued that the
(10:10):
results were really no worse than if you ate a
lot of like high fibers. They're like, I mean, look
at prune juice. Yeah, I have a special label on that.
Everybody loves prune juice, but you have no label. Nobody
likes brune juice. No, what are prunes made from? Are
they dates or um? Uh? I always get those confused,
(10:31):
the the dehydrated um. You know what I'm talking about? Prunes? Right?
So what is a prune? Is it a figure? A uh?
Is a date? A dehydrated version of something. I'm just
enjoying this. I think a prune is a plum? Okay, great, great, Well,
(10:52):
then a date is a dehydrated fig. My friend, and
a raisin is a dehydrated grape. That's right, and that
concludes this episode of short Stuff. Okay, well, if you
want to get in touch with let's send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com
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Hosts And Creators
Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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