Buying Olestra for Home Cooking...

Buying Olestra for Home Cooking...

by Liv | Published on January 9th, 2009, 1:52 pm | Food

So I'm making my french fries today and something occurs to me. It's occurred before. I mean, Olive oil is great an oil, but why in the year 2008 can't they produce an oil with no fat. Then I correct myself and say "They do Liv" and remember the fat-free chips I buy. They're fried in Olestra oil, but I don't ever recollect seeing bottles of the stuff available at the supermarket. Surely this most be very lucrative. If our everyone fried in fat-free oil, would it not shed hundreds of millions of pounds of fat from Americans diets?

So why don't they? Being sick, high on codeine and benadryl... I figured now is as good of time as ever to find out. Some quick searching didn't come up with much other then some FDA nonsense restricting it to a few items. No reason why, it just is.

A similar ethos appears to be responsible for the agency's reprehensible treatment of the fat substitute, Olestra. Even as government public-health officials are telling us to eat less and exercise more — in order to combat the nation's worsening epidemic of obesity, which now kills 300,000 people a year — they are also restricting an excellent tool for controlling the intake of fat and calories. In 1996, following an eight-year review, the FDA approved Olestra, a cooking oil that adds no fat or calories to food. (Olestra is a molecule of table sugar covalently linked to soybean or cottonseed oil, and is too large for the body to absorb or digest.) But they only allowed its use in chips, crackers, and other ''savory snacks," though Olestra can also be used instead of margarine, lard, butter, and oils in frying, baking, and sauteing. Moreover, Olestra is the most-tested food substance in history, having been subjected to far more trials than most prescription drugs. VIA

I'm still not sure I understand "Why?" So my first thought that comes to mind, if I can't get it in the US can I get it outside the US? I admittedly have done this with many regulated substances, frustrated by America's nonsense with itself and food or drugs. I'm not the only one. Talk to any senior citizen within a bus-ride of Canada or Mexico, and they'll tell you when to sign up for the caravan for meds. But sadly, I haven't found it's available elsewhere, unless someone knows something I don't....

Do they still use that stuff? I remember it back in the late '90's, but I can't remember the last time I've seeen those Wow! chips.... But I really don't buy chips anymore so it maybe that I'm just not looking....

Yes, I buy them all the time... They're a godsend for the dieter..

I think it gives people horrible diarrhoea.

Not me... and oddlly enough almost everything else does... but I could eat a bag of these chips and be good to go.

I've heard that there are a few people that have experienced bad side effects for such as diarrhea and abdominal pain, but the majority of people (including me) don't experience any side effects at all, except not feeling guilty for having a few potato chips. I have not been able to find anyplace online that sells it to the general public, but it would be really nice to have for home cooking.

I've never had side-effects though if I had a 50 gallon drum of the stuff I would make no guarantees.

Has anyone read this article yet?

http://reason.com/archives/2003/07/01/t ... principle/

It's quite long, but it does mention how the 'anti-pleasure ethic' of the 'Centre for Science in the Public Interest' (I hadn't heard of it before) possibly helped to undermine Olestra. I've definitely perceived a very pervasive 'no pain, no gain' ethic permeating anything from those health newsletters (I've given up reading them because they're all about how 'peaches prevent ovarian cancer' and then the following week 'peaches cause colon cancer but you can fix that if you eat five kilos of carrots a day' and then in the next issue 'are carrots killing us?' and so on) to what people say to each other in the supermarket queue. The notion that pleasure is invariably laced with painful consequences is so ingrained in a sufficiently large number of people that when something comes along that might allow them to eat as 'sinfully' as they want without the horrid effects that the ascetics have taught us must follow every lapse of puritanical virtue, they just can't believe it and actively look for 'the catch'. I think that must have been what happened with Olestra. People were already biased in favour of finding something bad about it - anything good is too good to be true - and so they instantly believed even the most tenuous claims that Olestra had hideous effects. Not all people - just enough people in the right places.

Personally I think that life is full of risks, and I love the maxim that goes something like 'diet, exercise, die anyway'. Something is going to get me anyway, so I'll just live with pleasure until then. Let's hope enough people see things this way to allow Olestra to be made available for everyone, should they choose to use it. I don't care much for fried foods though - what I need is a sugar that doesn't taste funny but has no calories, yay! -Ants.

Incidentally, I just noticed that the article I posted about the anti-pleasure ethic (as related to Olestra) is on a blog which appears to have some scary characteristics. Please allow me to specify that although I am interested in the contents of that article about puritanical scaremongering, I don't necessarily agree with everything on the blog because I'm a bit of a pinko. I am strongly in favour of free thought but I'm not convinced about the virtues of completely unfettered capitalism. So, I'm not plugging some kind of right-wing package deal by posting that article; I am only, and no more than that, interested in what that particular article has to say. I find it very intriguing and somewhat disturbing that ideas get lumped together in this way: if you believe in free thought then you must also be in favour of unfettered capitalism and leaving the working poor to starve, right? Sorry about the slight rant - I just want to make sure people don't think I'm sneakily engaging in some sort of political propaganda. It's just about the Olestra. Yours in hedonistic pinkoid befuddlement - Ants. :oops:

Along with savory snacks, couldn't we get an olestra vinaigarette spray for salads? :idea: