Word: fatted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...want to eat right. What we want is to eat whatever we feel like, in whatever quantity we want, without gaining weight or clogging up our arteries. And food producers are delighted to cooperate: supermarket shelves overflow with diet soda, sugar-free candy and, in recent years, fat-free cookies, crackers and snacks of all descriptions. Some of them may taste like chemical-flavored cardboard, but for millions of diet-conscious consumers, they're better than practicing self-control...
Olestra, however, could make guilt-free eating a pleasure. It doesn't just substitute for fat. It is fat, with all the flavor-enhancing, palate-soothing smoothness of corn or canola oil. And unlike any of the half a dozen or so fat substitutes currently available, olestra doesn't break down when it's used for frying. That means fat-free potato chips, French fries and maybe even Cajun feasts that taste like the real thing could someday be available to the general public...
...scientists' and advisory committees' recommendations, Kessler is weighing this one with special care. Olestra could become a staple in the diets of tens of millions of Americans, so it's crucial that it be safe. Moreover, nearly a third of all Americans are obese, and the combination of high-fat diets and extra weight contributes to heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and several types of cancer. If olestra could help drive down fat consumption, it could literally save lives...
...financial stakes are enormous as well. P&G has already invested $200 million in developing, studying and testing olestra. If the FDA approves, the company plans to use the fat in its own chips and snacks under the trade name Olean and sell it to other food producers as well. The annual market for all these olestra products could be worth $1 billion within 10 years...
Whether olestra is needed isn't the FDA's concern, however. Like all food additives, fat-free fat falls under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 and the food-additives amendment of 1958. According to those laws, olestra can be approved if it carries a "reasonable certainty of no harm" when used as intended. If olestra really makes people sick, as Jacobson and others assert, the agency might well reject it. But after much fretting over the precise definition of harm (and diarrhea as well), a majority of advisory-committee members decided that while the gastrointestinal...